Baking Vertex Ambient Occlusion Tutorial

[indavisual]

Here is another video tutorial I made. I know there's no audio and its not very polished but here it is. Let me know if it comes across clear.

http://www.vimeo.com/4539175

[dabu]

cool trick. Id love to see this applied in a workflow for an actual asset. How would you use it?

[indavisual]

You can bake lighting this way too so technically you wouldn't have to do your vertex lighting by hand/eye. You could just set up your lighting and bake it to vertices and then bake your ambient occlusion and combine the two. You may need to tweak it afterwards and whether or not it looks good may depend on how much geometry is cut into your models.

[Fingus]

Now what I would like to know is how to blend it with textures. This is a brilliant trick that will save me a ton of time, but it's pretty useless if it overrides my textures. :(

[rburke]

Actually you can bake your light and ao into one pass instead of seperately, there is 3rd party viewer apps that also remove the issue that this overrides the textures in many cases. Im working on a shader right now that will allow you to blend vertex light color with your textures using a set of sliders. When its done ill shoot it your way, will make this tech much more useful. Im pretty sure you can also do a vertex lighting to texture conversion in maya, so that would be another good workaround for the texture issue.

In fact now that i think of it you could do the vertex info on a higher poly model, then use the surface sampler to bake the lighting info onto the low poly version as a texture. id have to play with it a bit but that should get the job done.

[indavisual]

Sounds good. But, the point of the vertex lighting is so you don't have to bake it to texture. If you want your tiling texture to not repeat your lighting information on every tile it is best to keep the color info in the vertices. If you want to bake to texture you can do that with the same menu in Maya. Just switch Vertices to Texture where it says "Bake to". Actually Texture should be the default. If you use textures you can use a layered texture and bake a shadow map and a light map and overlay them onto your diffuse.

[indavisual]

To get the textures to show up you have to select the object and choose this...