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Unsuccessful AO baking
June 8, 2011 - 3:40am
- 2019 reads
Hi Everyone!
I am having some trouble with xNormal and successfully baking AO. The model is a hand gun. Most of the pieces including the highest tri count piece I can get to bake without a problem. It is just one piece I am struggling with. The progress bar freezes on the high poly analysis part of the bake right at the beginning.
Now I found a similar post by someone else where they had a similar problem and it was because of N-sided polygons. The problem is I have already triangulated the model before importing into xNormal so they should all be 3 sided. What could be causing this? I have been pulling my hair out all night and day trying to figure this out with no luck. Like I said, with the rest of the model I have successfully managed to bake without a problem but this one piece (using the same workflow) just wont work. By the way all my work is done on Maya (if that helps with anything).
The high poly meshes I am using are a very high triangle count. The highest poly part is over 2,000,000 triangles but that baked perfectly so I doubt it is a problem with my pc simply not handling it.
Any ideas? Anyone else had a similar problem?
Many thanks in advance for any help you can offer.
hmm. How much RAM do you have and what are your PC specs.?
It sounds like it may be a bad export. Have you tried baking an all quad mesh?
Hi Metalliandy,
Thanks for replying. I have a 2.4ghz Core2Duo E6600, 2GB ram, nVidia 8800GTX graphics card. I know the ammount of ram I have is not ideal but the strange thing is I managed to triangulate, export and bake a 2,000,000 triangle part of the mesh with no problems. This part is about 700,000 triangles and just wont work.
I have tried everything in poly cleanup bar the "more than 4 sided poly" option and it has made no difference.
I am sure I read somewhere online that there is a problem with Maya 2010 exporting as .obj for meshes containing more than 250,000 tris but it seems unlikely because of the mesh i mentioned previously.
There is a chance I might be able to visit a friend with Maya 2011 today so might take a flash drive with my work on and try the same process there just to rule that out.
I did also try baking a quad mesh and that made no difference sadly.
I guess something else I could try (if it exists) is some third party application which can convert to obj from one of Maya's native formats. Does anyone know of a piece of software that can do that? (preferably free!)
Could bad modeling practice have an effect like this? Or does it sound like it could be corrupt?
So I went round to my friends house who has Maya 2011. Sure enough I managed to export the triangulated model as .obj with no problems, brought it back on a memory stick, put it into xNormal to bake AO and its still sticking at the first analysis stage like I said before.
So what could be preventing it from working? Does it matter if there are "more than 4 sided polygons" on the model before I triangulate it? What can I get away with? If its triangulated, shouldnt it work?
EDIT: For not explaining myself properly
1. Pls, sure ALL your LP meshes have a material assigned and their are UV mapped.
2. Try using other format ( .SBM for example ).
3. If nothing works you can send me your meshes via a PM to debug them in depth.
Hi Jogshy,
Thanks for getting back to me. Not to worry though as I managed to get a fairly decent occlusion bake out of maya in the end. It seems my friends copy of Maya 2011 does a better job of it than 2010.
Thanks again though.
Just a little update,
I think the problem is worse than I thought. When I try and re-open the high res .obj file in maya, it just hangs or crashes to desktop. I think this might point towards a corrupted file. Is that correct? When I export a triangulated .obj file it often crashes too. I have to export to obj first, then open that, triangulate it and export again. After doing this it saves without crashing but then I cant open it again... o.0