AO in xNormal giving faceted results

xraysuede

Hello,

I am working on a pipe organ and I baked out an AO using xnormal. I am having an issue where I'm losing my smoothing groups from 3ds max when I export it as an obj using guruware obj exporter plugin. I have also tried xNormal SBM with the same results.

I have been detaching parts of the object and reattaching in 3ds max while making this object so I did lose my smoothing groups from that but I read that if I just do an edit poly on the object, it will allow me to see my smoothing groups again which does works. I can also pick faces using smoothing groups in 3ds max.

Now the strange thing is that when I use the textool function to split UV by smoothing groups, it says it cannot find any smoothing groups even though I can see them on the model.

The result of all this is the objects that should be smooth ends up with a faceted AO. The example below is basicly a cylindrical pipe that is one smoothing group.



I am not sure what I am doing wrong and any help would be greatly appreciated.

justinms66

What xnormal renderer are you using? You can get the best quality, but with long render times, with 256 rays, "default bucket render". The other renderers can be extremely useful, but if this is the result your getting, try the best quality you can get.

Additionally, have you re-imported the exported model into your modeling package just to make sure the smoothing groups are kept? And make sure your modifier stack is all baked down before you export.

samcole

I always render out AO maps with 512 set for the rays. I turn on AAx2, and everything else I believe I leave default. It might be you're just not using enough rays. Increasing rays will increase the amount of time it takes to render, but you always want to try to get the cleanest AO possible.

poopipe

just for sanity's sake..
reset xforms
turn to poly
collapse
put an edit normal modifier on then reset and unify the normals
collapse
redo your smoothing groups

if it doesn't work after that then you've either ticked the wrong options in the exporter or in xnormal

r_fletch_r

faceting usually comes from a couple of things in AO baking
1: your spread, or in some apps 'Cosine angle' is set too high and your faces are occluding themselves

2: your smoothing is faceting, this should be pretty obvious though.

Ace-Angel

Broken/Exploded UV's maybe? Reweld them in Max, Maya, etc and see.

xraysuede

I would like to thank everyone for their help. I did several things including the suggestions above so I am not sure what exactly fixed the issue but I believe it was incorrect settings in xNormal.

Thanks again, you saved me from going crazy!