Blender 2.8 Ambient Occlusion baking too dark

[George Mavroeidis]

Hello, I have an issue with AO baking. I tried baking the turret separately from the body and the extra mounting gun, but I get this: 

As you see, the baking barely even works for the turret. First, I baked the base of the tank separately to the turret. Then, I baked the turret and the barrel together and I got this result. The barrel has a bit of gray in it and the turret only has baked the two small barrels and the front part. After certain restarts, I get similar results. The UV unwrapping was done properly and the margin is set to 4px. The render settings (CPU or GPU) did not make a difference. I recalculated normals inside and outside as well. I also checked for any topology problems like double vertices or overlapping faces. The UV image is at 2048×2048 for PC usage. Last attempt, I tried playing around with ambient occlusion at world settings. I tried different values and I get the same thing.

Someone else had a similar problem, but he fixed it by changing from GPU to CPU or restarting Blender. I tried the same thing too, but it doesn’t work here. Any help?

[spikeyxxx]

Hi George, I tried to reproduce this, but the only time I could get a result like this is when the normals are inverted (facing inside). Please double check that, because it does look like they are partially facing inward.

All your settings should be right, because it baked the base of the tank alright. Also you can see that it does some kind of baking on the barrel and part of the turret, so I really think that your normals are messed up.

[status451_cg]

In the spirit of trying to avoid problems rather than solve them (aka my general life approach) – remember that these days you also have the AO shader node to play with.

If you can get better results out of that (e.g. by running it through a colour ramp and messing with the values) you could always bake the results of that.

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