Hi guys, having a little trouble baking this AO using maya 2012 and wondered if any of you out there could help.

The normal has come out perfect using transfer maps, but when I try to bake the AO I get this result.



Any Ideas on whats going wrong?

Thanks guys.

I saw similar results a while back, the mesh had rotations on it, and freeze/reset fixed it. It could be double faces too.

nvm

nvm rly?

Originally Posted by throttlekitty

I saw similar results a while back, the mesh had rotations on it, and freeze/reset fixed it. It could be double faces too.

Thanks Throttlekitty. Yeah I've deleted history and freeze transformed it. The normals are fine....no double faces as far as I'm aware.

If there were double faces wouldn't this mess the normal bake up too? (Which is coming out perfect in transfer maps).

Been stuck on this for a while now, I know I could use XNormal to get around it but I would really like to do this inside maya and get a flow down.

Annoying.

Yeah, the normal map would probably show problems too.
I can't think of any questions right now. Do you mind posting an obj?

Cheers man. I've solved it now. I re-moddeled the low and the normal bake is working. (even the normal messed up some how on the last one). Im going to try the AO when I get in from work. Thanks for ur help man.

Should have just quoted the nvm. Cheers

Haha yeah. Well the normal is fixed but the AO still comes out strange. I'm done with finding a solution and may just give in to XNormal.

I wanna bump this. Anyone have thoughts? My normal map bakes out fine, but the AO mamp doesn't. Seems like it'd be a cage problem but my cage is clean (thus my norm map looks good).

Yeah I've never had any luck baking AO maps with transfer maps in Maya, despite my other maps coming out just fine.
Was planning to test setting up the MRAmbient material myself and just transfering the shaded map, but haven't gotten around to it, maybe it would work better.

Otherwise I just bake my ambient occlusion map in xNormal, with a cage I generate in Maya to make sure it fits with my normal bake.

Yeah, just do it in xnormal, it'll be faster ans save you headaches

Yeah its pretty messed up that maya still doesn't have proper ao baking with transfer maps.

When I looked into this I was told that the workflow is to uv your high, bake the ao from the high onto its uvs, and then transfer it along with your normal map as a diffuse map with transfer maps.... Yeah, like that is something I would ever do.

I use XN whenever I bake in Maya. Besides, I bet AO in maya would be super-ass-slow,when I do work in Maya 2008 the normal bake takes about as long as the AO bake in XN, but maybe 2012 is actually multithreaded??

The "Batch Bake (mental ray)" feature for baking occlusion usually works quite fine imo. You should be able to use the MR materials as Bal mentioned, but takes a bit longer.