Strange baked Ambient Occlusion texture result?

Question

I'm getting some strange results with a lot models within a blender file. The AO baked result looks like this: (it's a car wheel).

But if I import a new copy of the model from an fbx file into the blender file, the baked AO result is fine, leading me to believe that my AO settings are correct, and that something with the models are wrong. I don't want to just use the newly imported model, since the old models have some slight modifications. With the old models, I did some testing with AO baking into the vertex, and probably some other stuff that I may have forgotten. The old models only have one other UV map (for their main texture) and the newly created UV map for the AO map, so I can't figure out what else may be causing the strange baking results.

Anyone seen this sort of issue before? I'm hoping that my old models have some problematic option set, that I may be overlooking.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I had other duplicate models overlapping causing the artifacts. D'oh! I thought that toggling the visibility of the other objects would prevent them from the AO calculations, but apparently I need to put the objects on separate layers to prevent affecting the AO calculation. black artifacts when baking ambient occlusion