Black texture when baking AO map in Blender.

[Jinx Niseru]

Blender will bake the sculpt map just fine, but simply refuses to bake an ambient occlusion map correctly. It's the only object in my project that has this problem. The baked texture appears mainly black with some barely noticeable artifacts sprinkled here and there. I also noticed that the object's lighting (highlight/shadows) looks almost inverted when draw is set to "shaded, but looks normal when draw is set to solid. I tried the steps listed for resetting the normals on machinimatrix.org to no avail.

[Catwise Yoshikawa]

In object mode click N to see "transform properties" and check if any scale is negative, that could be the problem ;-)

[Jinx Niseru]

Hmm yeah, there's a negative number in the z scale. But I can't seem to make it positive without making another axis negative. Any ideas?

Edit: Nevermind simply making that one scale positive did the trick. Not sure how you're supposed to determine what "should" and "shouldn't" be negative, but i'm just glad I can finally continue my project again. Thank you very much Catwise

[Catwise Yoshikawa]

You're wellcome.
I had the same problem once and was totally lost about it ^^' Tried everything until  I notice this negative thing in my object (not sure how I got a negative number there ). Just fixed deleting that - symbol.

[Drongle McMahon]

The scale goes negative if you mirror an object in Object mode, or if you use the stretch handles and go through zero, which has the same effect.

[Catwise Yoshikawa]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

The scale goes negative if you mirror an object in Object mode, or if you use the stretch handles and go through zero, which has the same effect.

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Yes, I know why is negative, but didn't do that...at least I was not aware of doing it

[Hayley Sahara]

SO, i have this exact same problem just now, and even if i fix the negatives its not gonna work. Any other ideas? Please? Anyone?

 

[Drongle McMahon]

Use Backface Culling, in the Shading section of the Properties panel, to make sure normals are the right way rounf. Make sure you don't have accidentally duplicated object or geometry on top of itself. Make sure all the faces are there in the active UV map. Wait until the bake finishes.

[KennyChidorie]

Change mode for view your texture. Or make fake light.

Good luck.