Im following along with a “tutorial” book with maya,ive created a leaf,baked a Normal and Alpha map,the normal map looks fine in photoshop,the Alpha is just black?? it should be white with the black outline of the leaf vines,ive re tried a number of times,checked settings but i must be missing something.
Anyone had a similar problem?

When viewing the alpha map - are you looking in the (photoshop) channels tab?
How are you creating the image file? Need more info here on what your doing…

n8skow [FA]

Ill try keep it short and hopefully to the point here lol:

Ive modeled a leaf with the vains slightly extruded, created an plane just bigger than the leaf and moved it just slightly forward of the leaf so its not touching,turned UVs settings to Normalization Off,checked the normals are facing the right way,the plane still selected i went to Transfer maps, search envelope is 0,selected the leaf mesh and loaded that into Source Meshes

Plane - Target meshes
Leaf - Source Meshes

Ambient map was allready in the output so i then picked Normal map,saved the Normal map as:

Leaf_Normal_source.tga (the mesh)

and the Ambient map as:

Leaf_A0.tga (the plane)

Connect Map Shader is uncked,Maya common output is 1024 by 1024

baked and closed

in the folder us saved both maps,i open them in photoshop,the Nomrmal map worked fine,the ambient was just black.

I know its hard trying to read some of these problems but hopefully this is a bit more info to peice together,thanks for the reply so far

What did you do with “Bake Alpha” option in the mental ray Common Output ?

The settings in Mental Ray Common Output are:

Map Height & Width - 1024

Keep aspect Ratio - checked

Transfer in - Worldspace

Number of samples - 1

Normal direction - Surface Front

Bake Alpha - unchecked

Alpha Mode - pass through

Final Gather Quality - 1.0

Final Gather Reflect - 0.0

UV Range - Normal(0-1)