2 Questions: Black Seams on AO Bake & Selecting Inverted Faces Only

[TankTaur]

Hi there!

Beginner digital artist here. I'm texturing someone else's model, and I've run into two problems in Maya 2012.

I'm doing an Ambient Occlusion Bake on the texture using mental ray batch bake of a Surface Shader with mib_amb_occlusion mapped to Incandescence. Works fine most of the time, but the bake always ends up producing ugly black lines along seams, and on the most recent model I simply can't stand it anymore. Having googled the thing it seems quite common, but I couldn't find any solutions ("Fix it in photoshop" was the only final conclusion...).
"Fill texture seams" doesn't seem to do anything.


The second problem is quite simple, I guess, but I couldn't find any simple answers through google here either. How do I quickly select only the inverted faces of the mesh, so that I may reverse the normals? The keyword is "quickly" - I do realize I can just go in and do it manually, but isn't the computer supposed to help us with these things, or am I just being naïve? :D

Hope to hear some good answers from you! Don't let me down Polycount!

[o2_is_alright]

Hi TankTaur,
Can't help you with your 1st question but for the second you should try Normals -> Conform. That should flip any reversed normals so they're all facing the same way.
Hope that helps^^

[Mekhollandt]

Hey Man,

The black seems along the edges are most likely caused because your UVs are getting the padding you need. All the way at the bottom of the batch bake window you will see an edge padding option. Go ahead and increase that from 2-4, and see if that fixes the edge issue. As for your other problem, try the conform normals thing. However, if you have more normals facing out than in, they will all turn inwards. So, to make ure it did it correctly, go to Display, and down to Polygons, and then to Face Normals. This will show you the direction your normals are facing. If the pins are facing out, your good and it worked. If they are pointing in, just go back up to Normals and then Reverse Normals, and you will be good to go.

[o2_is_alright]

So, to make ure it did it correctly, go to Display, and down to Polygons, and then to Face Normals. This will show you the direction your normals are facing. If the pins are facing out, your good and it worked. If they are pointing in, just go back up to Normals and then Reverse Normals, and you will be good to go.

Good point but I'd really recommend working with "Two Sided Lighting" switched off instead. That way all flipped polygons will be black instead of grey and are very easy to spot and fix as you go along with your modeling. You'll find it in the viewport menu under lighting.

[TankTaur]

Thanks a lot everyone. Work on the project is proceeding, and I was forced to eliminate the seams manually in photoshop.

The "Conform" function worked splendidly, however, so thanks for that!