3dsmax Ambient Occlusion bake problem
polycounter lvl 9
Hi guys,I waited 2 days and attempted to solve this by myself,watching several videotutorials and doing many bakes,but the problem still persist so I need your help 
I was trying to bake the AO of my weapon in 3ds max 2014 using mental ray and the last attempt I've done was following this tutorial.
Now,my cage set up is just perfect,since I fine tuned it by hand multiple time until I got a perfect bake of the normals,also the overlapping face in my unwrap are out from the 0-1 space.
The problem is that even if I assign to my object the Obj.Channel 30 in the G-Buffer and then I put the -30 in the Incl./Escl. Obj ID in the Ambient/Reflective Occlusion,I still get my low poly (wich should be used only as a cage) baked down into the AO in the parts where it goes outside the highpoly.
Btw,I am not judging the max preview window,I know is not reliable during the bake to texture,I am opening the .tga in photoshop.
Please help me,I am kind of stucked with this situation
I was trying to bake the AO of my weapon in 3ds max 2014 using mental ray and the last attempt I've done was following this tutorial.
Now,my cage set up is just perfect,since I fine tuned it by hand multiple time until I got a perfect bake of the normals,also the overlapping face in my unwrap are out from the 0-1 space.
The problem is that even if I assign to my object the Obj.Channel 30 in the G-Buffer and then I put the -30 in the Incl./Escl. Obj ID in the Ambient/Reflective Occlusion,I still get my low poly (wich should be used only as a cage) baked down into the AO in the parts where it goes outside the highpoly.
Btw,I am not judging the max preview window,I know is not reliable during the bake to texture,I am opening the .tga in photoshop.
Please help me,I am kind of stucked with this situation
Replies
also istead of messing with AO materials and gbuffer settings..why not just use the MR AO bake option in the Render to Texture dialogue...you could use the same method as in this 3dmotive tut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYBBt1utWb0
Keep in mind he is not projecting from a high in the video..you just have to make sure you projection is turned on in the RTT dialogue
hope that helps
I have done the MR AO method once more to show you guys the problem,as you can see in the image below the mirrored uvshells are outside of the baking 0-1 space,also in the image below that, you can see the AO I am getting out of it (low samples, spread:1,5 ; max dist: 3),on the right the grey is the HP model,the yellow is the low poly,and as you can notice the pattern inside the red square is the same where my lowpoly is on top of the highpoly.
Also for this last test I resetted the Xform as you suggested,and is not using the cage for the bake,instead is using an Offset:10 under Projection option->Method.
So basically the only thing fucking up my ao bake is this low poly wich want to appear on the bake at all costs...what am I doing wrong?
It's odd if your normals come out fine but your Ao doesn't with the same setup.
So the question stays:why is the low poly with projection baking himself into the AO? :poly122:
Is this a 3dsmax 2014 new "feature"? And how to work around this? :poly141:
right click and select "Objects Property"
Go to "mental ray" tab, and select "Pass Through (Invisible from FG)"
if you use GI, select exclude from GI both <---- Im too lazy to remember the name
hope it help
It uses your gpu to bake which only takes a couple of minutes compared to tens of minutes. You just input your normal map and you can bake a HP AO from it, if you input your mesh also you can bake a LP AO from that too.
Besides that though, why is your cage so close to your geometry? Might be why your getting those errors.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1881495&postcount=3
And if not:
Have you tried rendering with scanline?
Just add a skylight (and turn off all other lights) in your scene (and turn the color to white, standard it has a bit of a blue tint), enable light tracer.
Then add lighting map to your bakes, and bake.
It's not the best quality, but good enough for texturing purposes.
Another option if you want a nice AO, you already have your high/low and cage, just export those and bake in Xnormal.
If you untick Renderable on the lowpoly,then when you launch the render to texture it finish in an instant and you get only black.
Xnormal with cage worked for the most,but give some crazy unknown artifact in some parts(parts where max just bake down perfectly),insted using the ray distance calculator (400s of calculation) just produced an artifact map.
Scanline quality,as you said (and as was proved from the several bake I've done), is not the best quality,and I am very reluctant to go down to compromise when it comes to quality.
So now I think that the best option is a bake in max 2012,where I neve had any problem over many bakes.
I'll let you know how it turns out,for now thanks for your help guys
The solution was so simple yet no tutorial I watched talked about this xD
Love you,thanks man
Go into editable poly> face selection> edit geometry> hide selection. I seem to recall having to use face selection and not element selection, or it could be vice versa. But my senses say it was face selection.