Arnold Ambient Occlusion Render to Texture

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone

There are a few posts here about render to texture with Arnold being available in the latest update but I am struggling to get an AO map rendered.

• The scene is a house model, I used auto unwrap for the UV setup
• I use logarithmic exposure control so it is not view dependent
• Light is a Arnold skydome
• Material is standard with an Arnold AO map

Which of the texture elements should show the AO when rendered?

Also, does the size of the rendered map have an influence, due to the auto unwrap it is huge.

I am at the point of going back to vray but I would prefer to do this one with the given tools without 3rd party plugins

[madsd]

Try this.

AO -> map to material, and put that on the object.

Render a Complete map, since the AO is the only thing in the shader, it will render your AO.

[Anonymous]

Clever, I will try that tonight and give feedback. Thank you

[Anonymous]

what were your arnold render setup and render to texture settings for the screenshot?

did you place any kind of lighting?

how did you compensate for any shadows?

the rendered map shown is most likely what i am looking for..

I've been using scanline render setup, standard light, light tracer to get this result.

My way of using the completemap (AO) to create a cheat version of a normal map for my 3d model.

How i created this to emulate the type of normal map i need.

• Assigned a diffuse color of 128,128,255 (usually default normal map background color)
• Set a standard light
• did NOT enable cast shadows
• enabled light tracer
• Tweaked some of the light tracer settings to add some depth of shadow
• Set RTT to scaline selected Complete map
• RTT and this was my result

Its not as sharply detailed as arnold RTT results are, but from the look of your screenshot, this might be what I might be looking for.

Attaching my Scanline settings so that you can check them out to see what i used to create the above completemap to cheat a normal map.

and howdy Mad.. your the one who's been trying to help me with this very problem on a different post but pertains to the same problem.

[Anonymous]

here is a screenshot of the 3d model that map is related to so you get the idea of the map.

[madsd]

attached video of setup.

As you can see, nothing realy needs to be set.

[Anonymous]

@madsd 

Link to the above solution along with files that will provide a more crisp looking Map. TYVM for all your help 🙂

Dark and undefined Render to texture problem..

[jmaczka]

Hello, thanks for this info. It's a big help.

One question I have about output resolution of rendered textures. I am setting 2048x1024 and it keeps giving me a square texture(2048x2048). Does Arnold not like retangular texures? Or is there a setting I am missing?

[madsd]

Scanlines is the same.

you can try to do see if something like this would work.

https://forums.epicgames.com/udk/udk-development/modeling-and-skinning/199411-non-square-textures-51...

[anew3dmodeler]

I understand that this is an old thread. Thanks for the instruction video provided. It was really helpful!

However, I tried to setup the render per the instruction for the attached model and I did not understand why I was getting the highlight and shadows circled in red. I tried to play around with near clip, far clip and falloff, and could not figure out what was causing it. I checked the model, and it did not seem to have any unintended voids, etc in the mesh. When I looked at the "Activeshade + standard" render in the viewport, I did not see that shadow circled in green, but it is shown in the rendered texture. I am wondering if anyone can provide me with any advice, thanks!

[anew3dmodeler]

After further research, I seem to have fixed the problem by scaling the model arbitrarilly ten times bigger. I didn't thought it was the problem coz the real time render in viewport .seemed ok. Still trying to understand how the units and scale are affecting rendering.