DeaconK
10-02-2009, 05:04 AM
Way to use my first post. I've been doing modelling for around 8 years at this point, and now that I've begun work on a portfolio, and joined a game production class at my school, I'm looking into more advanced rendering techniques to bring a more professional look to my projects. One thing that caught my eye was ambient occlusion, and I've been looking into it and using it to varying degrees of success.
The one thing that bothers me, though, is that with the 'tried and true' method for Maya I've found online (using a surface shader with the Mental Ray mi_ambient_occlusion texture plugged into the color), turns out picture perfect renders every time, exactly what I want. So rendering still images is no problem, buuut...
If I try to bake texture maps with the exact same light set up, I get strange and frankly really annoying anomalies. If I have no lights whatsoever, one side comes out perfectly, while the other side comes out pitch black. Even with orthogonal reflections enabled, it leaves one side in pitch darkness. Wouldn't be too bad, just a mere annoyance if I was using perfectly symmetrical models, but I'm not. When I do add lights (which I'm pretty sure is a no-no in itself for baking ambient occlusion), the effect comes out totally ruined.
This problem more or less makes it impossible to prebake occlusion on all but the simplest meshes, which in turn means my rendering time if/when I get to animations will be through the roof compared to what it could be... Anyone know what might fix this?
The version of Maya in question is Maya 2009 64-bit, on a Windows 7 OS.
The one thing that bothers me, though, is that with the 'tried and true' method for Maya I've found online (using a surface shader with the Mental Ray mi_ambient_occlusion texture plugged into the color), turns out picture perfect renders every time, exactly what I want. So rendering still images is no problem, buuut...
If I try to bake texture maps with the exact same light set up, I get strange and frankly really annoying anomalies. If I have no lights whatsoever, one side comes out perfectly, while the other side comes out pitch black. Even with orthogonal reflections enabled, it leaves one side in pitch darkness. Wouldn't be too bad, just a mere annoyance if I was using perfectly symmetrical models, but I'm not. When I do add lights (which I'm pretty sure is a no-no in itself for baking ambient occlusion), the effect comes out totally ruined.
This problem more or less makes it impossible to prebake occlusion on all but the simplest meshes, which in turn means my rendering time if/when I get to animations will be through the roof compared to what it could be... Anyone know what might fix this?
The version of Maya in question is Maya 2009 64-bit, on a Windows 7 OS.