AO Maps, 30 parts, 3 textures?

Hey all,

Question: Why does Max 2012 create 30 AO maps when I have say 3 Materials? (30 Parts, 30 parts selected, 3 textures for all 30 parts). Max is making an AO map for each and every part, instead of for each Material.

Is there a way to compress all renderings for each/all parts into one, single AO map for each texture?

I am using the Scanline renderer as I cannot get the Mental Ray Renderer to function correctly.


Many thanks for any advice.

I know. It's really annoying when rendering textures for game models. Render to Texture has no idea you might want all (or some) of your objects to render to a single map. It's dumb. It just renders per object.

All you can really do is attach all your objects together that share a given material, render the texture then reload the orginal scene from before attaching. Once you have your maps you can do what you like with them.

There's a few external tools that deal with this better. Xnormal probably will, but I'm not sure.

Hey Robin,

I had just heard this 2 days ago from another forum. arrgh.... I had thought that it could do this, but I guess not.

xNormal does the same thing, and only one material/object at a time according to its maker. I emailed him on this before I purchased 3DS Max. The main reason I purchased Max was for AO maps. :S Looks like its going to be a hard road to plow.



Bill

Yeah that's a pity. It seems most programs are written assuming one map per object. That's not much good if you're doing something like lightmapping.

It's not free, but maybe look at Flatiron if you plan to do lots of baking.

http://www.texturebaking.com/

Not sure if it'll do what you want, but it might do.

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