Help Baking AO - Not Smooth

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Hi all, I’m trying to bake ambient occlusion for this helmet model but every time, no matter what tutorial I follow or what settings I use, the AO bake always comes out blocky. I’m assuming its because of my model. Does it matter where the seams are? Where the sharps are? I’ve flipped and recalculated normals many times with no improvement. Any help would be much appreciated!

I’m using approximate with about 6 samples with pixel cache at 1.

AO_prob.PNG1679×1049 204 KB

As you can see the shading is less than ideal. I’ve tried it with 256x256 (actual size) and I also tried it on 1024x1024 to see if a higher res fixes it. No change.

Thanks in advance!

2

Approximate AO is calculated based off of polygon density. If you have very low poly counts, it will get artifacts. You’re better off just using raytraced AO with 16 or 32 samples and then giving it a blur of a couple pixels in post if it’s not clean enough for you.

3

Thanks a ton! Blurring worked wonders!