I'm not familiar with the arnold implementation in max but if it's anything like Maya it'll be massively half arsed and there'll be a load of functionality not exposed through the UI
Looks like Arnold has another problem although . Its baking rays go indefinitely and looks like there is no way to limit it as in Clarisse or Modo. Gpu mode seems not working either in RTT baking. I get " UV camera is unsupported on GPU". Or maybe it's my old GF980ti
Blender does bakes AO and shadows that way, everything that's on the target surface itself. But there is no way it could see beyond. So with "Selected to Active" it doesn't work and thus it's pretty useless in Blender. Your empty normal pass for D part is showing it clearly. Arnold can bake alpha planes to low res…
I get it now, thanks for explaining. I can't say about Arnold as I don't use it, but with Blender Cycles it def seems to work, baking AO and shadows takes transparency into consideration if you use the texture alpha (or something else) as a mix factor to mix your opaque shader with a fully transparent shader:
That would work but sadly what I didn't clarify was that the target 'plane' isn't necessarily a plane. I have a feeling this might be doable with Arnold as you dont need to go through transfer maps so ill check that later. Fwiw I'm pretty sure I've had this working in max through rtt - it might have been with mental ray…
So I took a pass at it and haven't really figured it out, but I wanted to share a few discoveries anyway. I'm attempting this in Arnold since that is built into Maya these days. First thing you need to do is set the attributes of the meshes you want to use opacity, under the arnold section, uncheck opaque. If opaque is…
Yeah, actually it works in Max too with two sided material. Thanks for pointing it out for me. I just got lost in those AO materials and channels shuffles. In Max it's just Utility node that gives you world normal colors initially then Matte material instead of AO one where you could input opacity alphas and finally same…
I think you're missing the actual problem. I need the baker to be able to account for alpha in a texture that's applied to the source mesh. The card leaves example is the simplest - you make some leaf textures with alpha, arrange them into a tree shape and then bake that to a mesh that has a closed volume. (imagine baking…
I remember doing this awhile back with mental ray and using some sort of surface shader trickery rendering to a square aspect ratio camera. Not to sure how to do it nowadays with Arnold though it seems easy to do the albedo pass with one of the built in AOVs but I couldn't figure out the ambient occlusion that takes into…