Improving Occlusion map quality

[ninersix]

I've been baking out my AO maps with mental ray in 3ds max 9 (render to texture) for several years now, and I generally used default settings but set samples in the render to texture dialog box to 256 and was happy with the results.

However I just started using Max 2012 with the same settings and I have found that the end result of the bake quality is not identical to what I was receiving with max 9.
The edges around pieces of the model are somewhat jagged with white pixels in certain areas, and even the map in general is slightly more noisy and not as smooth in the overall finish.

Anyone notice the same issue and have any suggestions on improving the quality of the bake with different settings in perhaps the mental ray tab?

[NautalusX]

I suggest normal and AO baking in Xnormal, it provides good clean results and easily tweaked settings.

[Suraci]

As NautalusX said, xNormal is probably the best choice. It's an easy to use software and creates very clean AO and normals. It also comes with a extra filter you can use in Photoshop (well, I got one in my list of xNormal so I think it'll install itself once you install xNormal).

Plus there are quite some tutorials about how to get a propper bake.

[ninersix]

Although I don't doubt the usefulness of xnormal, I have found in the past that AO maps rendered with xnormal seem to yeild an entirely different result than an AO map created in max/maya.
Xnormals ao renders seem to be very soft with shadows relatively undefinded and inaccurate, although the benefits would obviously be the rendering speed of xnormal.

In conclusion to my original question, it seems as though there have indeed been some changes made to mental ray 2010-12 versions in regard to the internal settings.
My tests conclude that the changes made internally where to increase the speed of the renders compared to earlier versions, and therefore the quality of the output renders have suffered slightly.

[Benjammin]

AO quality is all in the settings, and Xnormal gives you a lot more control. Also, your best AO maps are typically a combination of AO and cavity maps, multiplied together in Photoshop.
The only reason for doing an AO bake in Max is when its faster than exporting files for Xnormal to use. Which is to say, not very often

[ninersix]

Originally Posted by Benjammin

The only reason for doing an AO bake in Max is when its faster than exporting files for Xnormal to use. Which is to say, not very often

Not really.
If you have a model with mirrored parts, and those mirrored parts do not have their own unique texture space and you still want to capture shadowing generated from those parts that appear on other areas of your model, then you can not do that in xnormal because you can only import 1 mesh. However in max you could separate the mirrored areas, still have them included in the scene (but not on the uv space), and then you would be able to capture the shadowing without having overlapping uvs or wasting texture space.