Did your issue get solved? because it honestly just looks like you have your distance set too high. Mess with these numbers:

Originally Posted by retleks

Did your issue get solved? because it honestly just looks like you have your distance set too high. Mess with these numbers:

spread had nothing to do with this. spread controls how wide the cone of rays is.

Retleks might be right, looks like an issue with the Max Distance setting. Try reducing it and see if it solves the problem.

Originally Posted by cw

don't forget you can also save render presets and object presets in max, which vastly reduces the ballache of switching back and forth for normals in scanline / ao in MR.

Yep. You can assign object properties to layers and then set objects to take their properties from the layer so you don't have to micro manage all of the object properties, just dump them on the right layers.

If you have a scene set up with lights and layers you can just dump your models in the scene and a lot of the work is done.

right and if the spread was lower you would get tighter ao... And I usually find that I have to balance the two... He could have a heigh distance and a high spread would just exacerbate the issue...

I guess if it was overdriven past 1 it could cause it.

First of all, thanks for all the info and help!

I have solved the problem by playing around with the max distance. Before it was set to 0... apparently 0 equals for infinitive distance (can this be?!)

In my first post's photo the object above my AO-Object is just the high poly I moved upwards to have a better look on the Lop-Poly. I was baking the AO from High-poly model to the low-poly.

Here are my new results after playing around with the max dist.





I didn't know that xnormal can bake AO too, next time I will go for it... But for simple objects like this I still want to be able to do the render quickly in 3ds max.

And what about Light tracer... I can't select that renderer.. or isn't it a renderer?

Here Laurens Corijn(Xoliul) goes over ao baking in max, lighttracer is the first one he covers.
http://www.laurenscorijn.com/article...clusion-baking

Originally Posted by Stromberg90

Here Laurens Corijn(Xoliul) goes over ao baking in max, lighttracer is the first one he covers.
http://www.laurenscorijn.com/article...clusion-baking

If you're going to use scanline you're better off staying away from the skylight method, for the reasons Laurens brings up and because its really really slow. Instead use scanline and a custom light set up, like a light dome made up of spot lights. This script makes one easily and quickly and allows you to tweak the settings in one spot, pretty handy. You can also do it on your own and drop it in your scene.

Using a light dome is much faster than using a skylight and much more customizable. Scanline right now actually calculates edge padding correctly unlike MentalRay that just makes a mess of the padding (see examples in my previous posts).

Thanks Mark, I tried to create one myself once but it did render horrible slow, probably something wrong with the settings I used.
Going to try that script out, always enjoy faster rendering

The light dome sets the shadow map size pretty low for each light (default of 128 I think), which if you had a lot of lights with large shadow maps (default of 512) it would slow the render down, especially if you turn on light tracer or switched to raytrace or area shadows.

From my tests it was pretty useful fast rendering, even when I had the shadows maps at 512 cause I thought 128 was to smooth, wonder why I have not seen this script mentioned before here, seems like a good alternative to the other methods