Ambient Occlusion: Baking AO the Lesser Persons Way, with the Light Tracer!
I have made this really simple...thing (fig.1) its not actually
anything so don't worry yourselves about that...just was quick and easy
to unwrap and will show how it all will work. In this object I don't
have anything sharing the same uv coordinates so we wont have any
errors when we render out the AO map. As you start to use the AO map
with more complex models, which I am guessing you would do, you will
have more UV's sharing the same space. This can cause problems with
your map...and really any map you will be rendering out with max's
render to texture. Now we'll set up the sunlight and light tracer....I
probably don't even have to show this, but...I'll pretend like you know
nothing about this...just incase someone really doesn't have a clue.
Fig. 1
So this picture (Fig. 2) should be enough to explain where to find the
skylight in max. You're gonna want to click on skylight and then create
it over whatever objects you have. Really it doesnt matter where you
create this little guy...the skylight isnt directional, so you could
put it where ever your little heart desires!! Ooooh just feel the
freedom!!
Fig. 2
Now we need to set the light tracer up (Fig. 3) this is also a step
most people know how to do so...once again the picture should explain
enough. I really never mess with the settings of the sunlight or light
tracer, and the results are fine...
Fig. 3
Now we are going to the the actual render to texture setup. To get
there press zero, and make sure that the object you want to render the
AO map for is selected. Once the window comes up scroll down to the add
button as seen in Fig. 4. Once you click that a little window should
pop up as seen in Fig. 4, for our AO map you will want to choose
complete map. The rest of the render to texture setup is quite self
explanatory, you can set where it saves the file, what the name of the
file is and the size. Usually I just render out a quick 256 or 512 in
order to check for mistakes and problem areas, it's alot quicker than
rendering out a 1024 map every time.
Fig. 4
Once you have set up everything in the Render to Texture setup, go
ahead and press Render. One thing to make sure you do is have a plain
grey material on the object you are rendering, if you have a texture on
the object it will render the texture on the object. So just apply a
default material to the object before rendering, unless you want to
just render out the shadow map over your already finished diffuse.
Sometimes that can be useful, but personally I like to clean up the
shadow map in photoshop, and tweak it a bit...but from there it is all
up to you!!
Here is the final render of the object...(Fig. 5)
Fig.5
Hopefully this was usefull...lemme know of anything I should add/change
since this is the first time I've tried this really. Anyhow hope you
liked
I am going to be attempting to make some short video tutorials showing
my workflow, so hopefully I will finish that up and get em up here
soon. I have a cold tho...so might wanna wait till my nose clears up
If there is anything you would like me to try and make a tutorial about, just lemme know, I can see what I can do...
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