As this dated game cant take vertex baking it looks like you have to waste the time in rendring out an AO bake to texture.
Instead of putting a light in your scene and rendering to texture with the slow scan line renderer to get yourbakes, try this it's lots faster and gives better results..

1. Assign the Mental ray renderer at the bottom of the render setup pain in the Common tab.
2. Open up the material editor, select a material and add a Mental ray shader to it. 
3. In the surface slot in the Mental ray shader add a Ambiant/Refective Occlusion shader.
4. turn the samples up to about 100.
5. go back to the Render Setup pain and choose the Processing tab. click the tick box that say material overide. drag your material created above from your material editor to the slot next to the tick box. hit instance so any changes to sample rate done in the shader will also be updated to it.
6. Go to Rending and choose render to texture.
7. in Render to texture go down to Output and click add.
8. Select Ambiant Occlusion (MR)
9. Choose your Res of Texture.
10. go to the box above and click "Use Existing Channel" for the mapping. if youve mapped on channel 1 (and you will have) make sure it's set to 1.
11. select your part of your model you want to bake to texture and hit render.
12. A warning for using the Automatic exposure Control will come up. dont worry everything will render out correctly. hit continue.
13. wait for the render to finish. the higher the sample rate the longer it takes but it's faster and cleaner than using the scan line radiosity.

you can use an exposure control but you'll need to set it up or your bake will be very dark. this is handy for taking out any contrast etc but this can be done on Photoshop if need anyway so it's not that important really.

The above method is used in high end renders and give better results.

I hope this helps those that use Max.atomicveilside 
New to the Forums
 
Posts: 8
Joined: Tue Jan 25, 2011 1:29 pm
Private message