Ambient Occlusion problem

[Artificial Gloom]

Hello,

I have just created the scene in the snapshot below using 3ds Max 2013.  Although many of the objects are fine and I'm able to render to texture an AO map for them, I'm having very strange results for the objects in the scene which seem to be shaded very strangely.

The Jug, Legs, and Spindles are not picking up the skylight correctly and when I render to texture, the AO map is completely black.  

I'm sure this is something simple to fix but I have no idea what I've done wrong.  Any suggestions would be gratefully received.

Thank you, Artificial

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Two things I can think of...

One, bad UV mapping, which would be easy to spot so I don't think that will be it...

Two, maybe inverted normals? I always turn on backface culling in the object or layer properties, that way you can see if the normals are facing the correct way. There are more ways to check the normals, but this is what i use.

[Chic Aeon]

This is in BLENDER so hopefully you have equivalents

 

Make sure that Location, Scale and Rotation are correct at the end in Object Mode - Ctrl +A - Location, Rotation and Scale) although I don't thing that is it as the look is different.

One thing that sometimes happens to me and that I found the answer on a search -- is that the the object not baking needs to be selected in the OBJECT window before baking. That has solved the issue for me a time or two. So check that. 

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

One other thing that crossed my mind, is everything in that picture on one UV map? If you have multiple materials (multi-sub), 3ds Max doesn't understand the multiple ID's. In that case you should either combine everything into one material, or split the object into multiple objects, each with their unique material. I never understood why a program like 3ds Max doesn't bake multi-subs, but that's just the way it is. When you have your occlusion maps baked, you can combine the seperate pieces into one object again.

The suggested resetting of scale and such is "Reset XForm" in 3ds Max. It's in the utilities tab on the far right, the little hammer. After that, turn the object into an editable poly again and check the orientation of the normals.