You could bake your normalmap using floaters, then use CrazyBump to render a displacement map from the normalmap. Then discard the floaters and bake AO from just your model & displacement map. I haven't tried this, mind you. It just seems like something that might work.
[ QUOTE ] You could group all your floaters together and hide them for your ambocc bake, but then you won't get the shadows in the divots - its really easy to paint out of your ambocc bake. [/ QUOTE ] You could do a separate AO pass on the floaters and merge everything in Photoshop, though it's probably not a big speed…
Chiming in to say get the Advanced Painter script. http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/advanced-painter It works in Max 9, I use it at work all the time. It lets you select a piece of geometry as a "brush" and then paint it onto another piece of geometry - so now those 20 screws you wanted to put around are all properly…
[ QUOTE ] Any of you guy have a solution for getting rid of the AO problem with floaters? Specifically the shadow it creates around a floater's edge? [/ QUOTE ] I came up with a bit of a hack for this. I personally dont think its really worth the time spend to do this, but here goes(much easier to paint out the wierdness,…