I know I sound incompetant right off the bat, hear me out :) I'm using render to texture to bake out shadow maps for multiple parts of a vehicle, every part so far has rendered perfectly, but this part for some reason comes out too dark. The render window looks fine, but the file it saves out is much darker, I'd like to…
I'm with Mark on this. Mental Ray's AO baking is your best bet. You will get good results from it. I've always created what I refer to as a "global controller" AO preset and stuck it into my personal material library, and I instance it whenever I need to render AO by putting it into the material override. I don't ever…
If you want ambient occlusion you should render just an AO map. The default scanline render-er doesn't have AO so you need to switch it to Mental Ray or some other render-er like vray. Or use an external baking program like xNormal. Or if you have a normal map you can use several photoshop plug-ins (xnormal comes with one)…
What is in the render window isn't correct and should always be ignored. It is a full render including the scene lighting (even scenes with no lighting still have the default light(s) behind the viewport camera). But if you don't want the actual shadow map, then you should render a diffuse map with lights and shadows…
AAAAARGH, I rendered the same problem piece today and it's come out perfectly! Must be a bug... Still going to have a look at Mental Ray though, hopefully it's a little more consistant.
Thanks for the fast reply! I know the render window isn't correct, but with the method I'm using, it's exactly what I usually get out of a render (minus the padding), this one damned object excluded. I technically want an ambient occlusion map, and the skylight is the only light I have in the scene, so it creates the…