Automatic AO / Global Illumination In 3Dsmax?

[Zeta]

I've been searching for a simple and effective way to bake lighting onto my models for a while now. From google searching and talking to a few people I've gotten the impression that there might be a way to automatically render to texture ambient occulusion maps in 3dsmax at the touch of the button, is this the case?

So far in my pursuit of nicely baked shadows ive managed to render to texture shadows cast from a skylight onto my models but there are some downsides to this. One being that i seem to encounter some errors whereby several faces don't appear to recieve any shadowing when they clearly should be, screwing up the output.

Ideally I want to be able to automatically generate an AO map from just the mesh data aone, no actual light, so there are shadows in the recesses etc from all angles.

Does anyone here have any experience with this?

cheers

[Minos]

I never had any problems with baking AO maps in 3dsmax myself... just place an skylight, pick your object, go to render to texture dialog, set padding to 2 (so you don't get black lines on the output), choose "use existing channel" instead of "automatic mapping" and then render a "completemap". Also, make sure to apply a pure white material to your object before baking the texture, so you don't get a dark output.

[skdr]

- Set your renderer to scanline light tracer

- Drop in one skylight

- Make a good grey/white material

- Render to texture