Problem with baking AO and Normals...

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hello everyone !

I have spent nearly 6 hours today trying to understand what i was doing wrong here…

I have 2 objects from a Mixing Console: One is the plate underneath some buttons, the other object is a collection of push-buttons.

I wanted to bake the AO on the plate so that i could gain render time later on.
BUT: randomly the process ends up strangely: sometimes it is done but cut diagonaly along the square plane with one side plain (?!), sometimes it works fine… It seems to work better if i only set my thread count to 1.
Other problem: 2 knobs have very strange normals when you bake to normals. They are different from the others. If i destroy them, make some knew (duplicates of the others), unwrap again, PAF it comes back !

Sorry for the scrappy explanations: i am exhausted and fed up with Blender right now: today it really seemed to me it was a big bunch of bugs ! It crashed 3 times and had this unregular behaviour with baking AO …

Here is the .blend file.
Here the picture for the materials (I have tried packing them in too)

Can you help ??

Attachments

NeveCloseUp3.jpg600×600 24.8 KB

Pb with Normals.png800×600 74 KB

PB with AO.png800×600 16.5 KB

2

Sometimes the baking has glitches like that, I haven’t figured it out either.

Have you tried a different UVunwrap?

3

Hmmm No I haven’t.
This is the simplest possible Unwrap though Project from view from the top.
Shouldn’t be a source of problems with such a simple mesh…

4

destination object sometimes needs mirror and subsurf removed…

5

The normals is determined by the light, perhaps the light is close to the ones that are different.

Its often better to unwrap and place your faces how you want them, so you can see all of them and none are under other faces (stacked). Oh you say you used project from view from the top? Does the object have a bottom?

dont know if that will help, but its worth a thought, smile.