I have so much respect for people who can work on something all day and hit a wall like this and just keep going. I'm just done. I've tried everything and now I'm gonna scrap this project because I'm all

out of patience

ooooh..ok now i'm using blender and don't know maya, but i had a similar problem once, and it turned out it was just slow on my preview. So the bakes were actually THERE, but turned up black in the preview

window, while as i actually saved the image it was fine! could be something like this?

the preview is ok, it's the baked out map that's black

hmmm. normals you checked? sometimes i flip them a few times god knows why then it worksout

I figured normals, but I reversed them just for kicks, and it didn't help. And besides, I'm pretty sure the render preview shows them wonky if they are reversed... like it won't render there either

I know I've done that before. But this is fine in the preview.

aargh sowwie i dunno then! I'm only used to blender and even in there i dunno sometimes lol

it's beautiful in the render editor. lol I know it's some stupid setting but I've googled and watched a few tutorials thinking I'm missing something stupid, reset everything to default and started again.

I just hate that feeling of wasting most of a day on something then hitting the wall. Thanks for the ideas though. At least it makes me feel like I'm not missing something super obvious

I need to switch to blender. I'll have plenty of questions about that soon

I had that happen in blender, and what I had done was used solidify to make the inside of an item. But I didn't give it enough distance from the outside, so in essence, parts of it were inside other parts.

^oh yeah!!! had that too!!!

ahah

lol i now first bake then do solidify XD

Also, I once duplicated an object and didn't realize, so the normals seeeeemed ok but weren't. I'm so noob.

cause sometimes they end up all weird with squares and ish lollllll

YES!

so now i just bake and do solidify last hahaha

Renee, you could try to import it in world and apply a color to it, and see if it takes. If not, it's the normals.

I'm NO expert as you know. Just a thought that helped me.

< by FAR not an expert, either. trail and error! LOL

sometimes i'm just hitting the recalculate and flip normals over and over again, untill its right. dont'ask me how or why but it does the trick

It's so hard sometimes especially when you cannot figure out what is wrong.

Yeah, same here. Or I select only a section and recalculate the normals and it fixes it.

But seriously Renee, the one time all my normals looked right, I had duplicated the object unwittingly so there were two of them and I couldn't see it no matter what. I had already joined it all.

Are you using a shader with AO on it or using the occlusion settings in the mental ray bake settings?

If you are using the bake settings I suggest using your own shader instead for greater control, and when you actually bake your AO shader the bake settings should be set to Light & Color instead of occlusion.

My guess is tweaking the distance on the AO settings on the shader would help. The default AO bake settings don't allow you to adjust that and that can result in really weird bakes.

it takes a color and texture just fine in world. I'm pretty sure it's not duplicated either. (I've done that though), I used a shader with the AO, but I used occlusion too. I saw one tutorial where the

guy did light and color with the shader, I'll give that a shot

thank you!

well that didn't help, but it is something in the model though, and not the settings. I just tried baking and sphere with the shader thrown on it and it worked fine. I didn't extrude or use any tricks for the

interior, but maybe it is too close to the exterior. I guess I'm going to scrap this model and start over

Try a Mesh -> Cleanup?

well, that was interesting. It made the test render turn out black, so then I flipped the normals and I'm doing another bake.

If you go into the shape attributes to render stats you can toggle off double-sided so you can see if it's inside out or something like that too.

thank you! That's a big help.