Tutorial: Ambient Occlusion in Maya - by Alchemist101

[Cryrid]

Individually. They should still pick up AO from other visible geometry regardless of the UV, so you wont be losing any details. In fact, you'd be better off splitting the mesh into different pieces for the AO and hiding some anyway due to the moving parts involved - it would look funny if AO from the turret gets baked onto the front of the tank, as it will be there even if the turret is rotated 180 degrees.

[3dnirvana]

Hi Cryrid, thanks a lot......I finally got a good AO map baked at last. I discovered the mistake that I did very often. After assigning the materials to the different objects, I use to combine them before baking the AO and that's where the problem use to occur. Any ways thanks for the tip.

[purva]

Wow fantastic tutorial.Thank you so much!

[BreadMan]

Has anyone else been having trouble with Fill Texture Seams having no effect in Maya 2012? I've never had any trouble using this process in the past but have spent the entire day today trying to figure out why, no matter how I fiddle the settings, every bake comes up with black pixels along every seam. Any support for my sanity would be much appreciated.

Edit: this is what the output window is throwing out, I'm guessing it's related:

mental ray: got 8 satellite CPUs.
PHEN 0.3 warn : maya_postlightmap(): Need tag buffer to overbake.
IMG 0.3 warn 102002: type rgb not supported by tga format, using default type rgba

[samloeschen]

Originally Posted by 3dnirvana

Hello Benclark, Thanku so mach for the awesome tutorial. I have been in the process of discovering few tricks and techniques in baking an AO map. Presently im working on my Centurion M41 tanker, here is the link http://www.game-artist.net/forums/wo...an-tanker.html

The query Iam going through is that I have a set of totally 4 sets of uv maps, i.e I have broken down the entire tanker model in to 4 divisions since I couldn't accommodate them in 1 single map. Now if I happen to bake the AO.....should I bake them individually or entirely. If I happen to bake them individually, I might be losing a lot of depth details at the point of intersection between 2 adjacent faces or if I happen to bake them entirely, how would the uv's co-ordinate since its a set of 4 individual maps. Im in the process of trial and error streets......I would really appreciate if you suggest me with good tips.

I have this same problem with my bakes, i've just been painting borders around my seams in photoshop, which is annoying. Anyone know a fix for this?


Also, I'm new here. Hi all.

[ShoT]

Originally Posted by BreadMan

Has anyone else been having trouble with Fill Texture Seams having no effect in Maya 2012? I've never had any trouble using this process in the past but have spent the entire day today trying to figure out why, no matter how I fiddle the settings, every bake comes up with black pixels along every seam. Any support for my sanity would be much appreciated.

Edit: this is what the output window is throwing out, I'm guessing it's related:

mental ray: got 8 satellite CPUs.
PHEN 0.3 warn : maya_postlightmap(): Need tag buffer to overbake.
IMG 0.3 warn 102002: type rgb not supported by tga format, using default type rgba

Originally Posted by samloeschen

I have this same problem with my bakes, i've just been painting borders around my seams in photoshop, which is annoying. Anyone know a fix for this?


Also, I'm new here. Hi all.

In the Transfer Maps window, under "mental ray Common Output" is a setting called "Fill texture seams", default I believe is one, I've always used 4 just to play it safe, I never bunch up my UV islands anyway so it didn't matter.

That's if your baking your maps using mental ray which is the case for Ambient Occlusion maps, but for anything that uses Maya's renderer, make sure you change the setting for "Fill texture seams" under "Maya Common Output".

Hope this helps.

[Maxresources]

Very nice and detailed tutorials. Really appreciate for posting it and we expect more tutorials from you.