Trouble Texture Baking: Global Illumination (mental ray)

I've been trying to get Global Illumination with Mental Ray working well enough to bake quick sculptie textures without having to set up messy lighting. I've messed with all kinds of rendering options, but every time I bake the texture one side of my sculptie ends up being completely in shadow. Is anyone familiar with this happening?

I've tried rotating the object, assigning a new bake set, and messing around with options for Mental Ray, but nothing seems to have helped.

I have no other lighting in the scene. The side of the object that gets textured looks just perfect for what I need if only the other side wouldn't be in shadow.


Edit: changed subject of the thread

Does global illumination still require other light sources in the scene for all sides of an object to be lit?

I really feel like I'm missing something obvious.

I tried figuring this out again this morning and it appears that there is something wrong with my bake set that is causing this to happen. Even with a spot light directed at the darker side of my object it is still ending up being black on that side.

Is your object sitting on the construction plane? Try elevating it.

It's not on the construction plane. I've tried moving it around on all axes as well. There's something going on with my bake set, but I haven't figured out what it is. If I Batch Render with the default Mental Ray settings without having a bake set then it does fine although it appears I will have to add some extra lighting on one side anyway since it ends up being slightly darker. I've tried several different bake set configurations to see if I could find the problem, but it always ends up black on one side.

I might just go back to using a lot of point lights since this is turning out to be such a hassle.