[Maya] XGen AO Baking & Mental Ray
polycounter
So I'm trying to generate hair textures from Xgen renders using mental ray in Maya 2017 and am running into some problems. Has anyone tried baking AO and the results are coming plain white? I'm trying to play with the AO Max Distance slider in the mental ray Render settings (falloff mode set to Quadratic), but I can't get it to show me some delicious shadows.
Has anyone tried anything like this? Any suggestions?
Has anyone tried anything like this? Any suggestions?
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Edit: I checked with the setting in my scene and the 'AO Max Distance' is at 6.33 - not sure if this is standard or I changed it. I know I had the issue previously, but I can't remember if I did change anything except checking the passes in the scene that I used in the end. Oh and I've been using splines not extra converted to geo with the xGen_Hair shader.
@oglu Would be nice to get the AO just by rendering and avoid any inconsistencies created when converting to poly, but I might have to resort to that if all else fails.
Curiously enough, a few pixels are painted in the center of the screen. I wonder if this has to do with my unit system , even though my scene is set to default (centimeters).
here all my 3 settings - quality, the scenes-screen with the AO max distance and the render passes screen. For that passes-screen you need to go to the plug-in manager. I am not sure you would need the other settings once you get the render passes and select the AO pass to be rendered.
Sorry, I wish I would be more certain with my answers, but I only set it up once so far and I was kinda messy getting there, but this should still be solving your issue.
Still, I admit not really knowing what just happened, I just copied your setup in the Passes tab. I also suspect enabling ambient occlusion in the Scene tab doesn't affect anything, since in my render view now two passes are displayed: AO (I assume this one being the one set up in the Passes Tab) and ambient_occlusion (setup in Scene tab). the ambient_occlusion one still looks plain white, but that's not an issue given I was able to obtain the pass from another place.
Could you briefly explain what's going on in this Passes tab? Are these "shadow" and "shadowRaw" linked to the AO pass? I added the AO, clicked the down arrow, then added shadow and shadowRaw.
I am also not completely sure how all those settings for Mental Ray are interconnected and why the passes work out of the box without issues. I must admit except some basic lessons from school I never bothered too much with rendering in Maya. In any case you can ignore shadow and shadowRaw. This seems to be rather a short list where you can keep your passes for quick selection before rendering. I for example don't render AO each time because it is so slow. I only rendered it once I had the final shape for the hair, while I might tried different color renderings. I haven't used shadow and shadowRaw in the end, I had them there just in case, so you can skip them and just get the AO pass.
As far as I know the passes tab is just some standardized version of those passes that you could set up manually with rendering layers. But I also didn't get a very in depth explanation back in school for this, so better ask someone who knows his stuff XD