3d max - Baking NM and AO

Gerbeiter

I want to ask you about your system of making NM and AO. When you're making some object (for example gun) there are many subobjects that need to be baked from highpoly for normals and AO.
When Im making such object, I bake first NM and then AO separately for every single subobject - its frustrating when I always have to switch over from Scanline Renderer (for normal maps) to mental ray (for AO) and vice versa (Options -> setup -> common -> assign renderer ).
Is there any easier method of this process?

Kbrom12

I get better results using scanline for AO than mental ray, just bake out a complete map with a pure white material on the high poly and low poly. I turn light tracer on and crank up the settings, I also switch the filter to catmul rom in the render settings tab and turn on hammersly global supersampling. One more thing I make sure to do is to keep a skylight in the scene, by default the skylight has a slight blue tint to it so you need to change that to make it pure white. Use the same settings for normal maps as well so it makes baking them both out at the same time quite nice and fast with good results.

here is a great link with information for you: http://www.laurenscorijn.com/articles/ambient-occlusion-baking

I do method 1