Ambient Occlusion renders black in 2016

[Anonymous]

Hi guys, I have this problem that whatever settings I've tried, the ambient occlusion turns out black. I want to make a ambient occlusion texture, using Transfer Maps, and lately I've tried making just a render image to make it work. 

I've tried a surface shader + mib_amb_occlusion in the Hypershade window, I've tried the presets from a new render layer with the items added, also in a fresh scene with primitives, and I've tried meddling with the max distance, tring both 0, 5, 10 and 50 with no luck, but if I understand the max distance correctly, if it's 0 it should be white or almost white, not black. 

I've also tried changing from OpenGL til directX because I read somewhere the graphics card could be the problem.

I did have a warning that rgbh_a was not supported by the various image types I tried, and with OpenExr the warning dissappeared, but it was still all black.

I've rendered AO several times before with succes, but not on this PC, and not in Maya 2016 which I am using now 😞 I'm wondering if theres a change in 2016 that causes my problem. 

I'm getting kind of desperate now and feel I've tried all solutions I could find online. If any of you can help me I'd be so happy 🙂

[Anonymous]

I am also having the same issue, i found that if you render a single image and save it, as the same window comes up on the right side of the box there is the option to save as raw file, or color-managed and if you change this setting to color-managed you will get your color back. how ever that is where my issue's begins because I  can figure out how to do that for batch renders so again no matter what i do it renders to dark.

[Anonymous]

I ended up trying in blender, and it rendered without problems, so I rendered all my models in Blender instead. I never figured out what the problem was, but I'm in general so tired of Maya/autodesk. It crashes so often, and it's so easy to make malformed or corrupted models, without any way to find it to correct it. The unwrapping is so bad and old school, and the plugins i can find online takes such a hassle to make work. I'm so tired of technical issues!! Fortunately my work pays for the maya license, I'd never buy it if i were a freelancer, i'd learn Blender.