cycles vs blender internal for ao baking?

[mkwabo]

I was curious on which render engine should i use? I know internal is faster and cycles is more accurate but does that matter for tf2 modeling. Also if you prefer cycles could you suggest some bake settings.
Thanks

[HellJumper]

Well I've only ever used cycles to render scenes (not bakes), but I guess it would make sense that you could render bakes using cycles. For TF2, the regular method should be sufficient. If you're having trouble getting good bakes, you should bake at a really high resolution (like 4096x4096) and scale down in photoshop.

[mkwabo]

Thanks jumper also i was curious on what to do for beta importer, as i 'm making shoes for the pyro and he doesnt have a body group for shoes, Do I have to manually import because of this?
Thanks

[HellJumper]

I don't think the pyro has any shoe replacements atm (except one halloween item which I think is just modeled over the default shoes). I don't know if it will be viable to make pyro shoes unless you make a bodygroup for the pyro which would require editing the pyro's model.

Perhaps you can make the shoes as an addition to his current ones. Manually importing won't change anything.

[mkwabo]

Ok thanks for the advice

[NimrodX]

I'd use Cycles for this. I've run into too many bugs trying to bake with internal.

[mkwabo]

Do you have any recommended cycles settings? I just tried it and i dont't think the bake came out right?

[NimrodX]

With cycles you need to make sure you have a texture node (at least one) in the material asigned to the object. For bake to work, that node must be the currently selected node in that material. This means you can have multiple texture nodes and to control which is usd for output, just make sure it's the active selection. Also make sure you already created the image to bake to (so you can control the size etc) and make sure that image is in the node.

What were you trying to bake exactly (what type of bake) and what didn't work?

Also, it may help to go into edit mode on the object and do a select all (A) on all the faces. Baking may only operate on selected faces.

[mkwabo]

I was able to get the bake to work, however the dark spots on my bake were practically black, I am trying to bake a helmet and backpack, however when i baked in internal using helljumpers settings the dark spots turned out just to be a a darker shade of grey , also thanks for the help so far appreiciate it

[NimrodX]

You probably need to change your world material so you have some global ambient lighting for an AO map. Some types of baking are based on lighting, whereas some (like normal maps) don't take it into account.

[mkwabo]

Hey thanks for the advice I got it to turn out the way I wanted.