Tutorial: Ambient Occlusion - Baking AO with Light Tracer

[TychoCelchuuu]

Another example of how to use AO is here: http://www.game-artist.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2146

[Xoliul]

Hmm, personally I find using the standard Light Tracer & Skylight for AO to be inferior to using Mental Ray's AO bake method in Max...

[DaveW]

Using a skylight with cast shadows is far more accurate than light tracer. And personally I export it to a shadows map - not a complete map. If you're using a gray material if you try to use it as an AO surely it would darken the entire texture?

[Kawin_cfc]

how to use a normal bump with the render to texture MR Ambient Occlusion map so that the ambient light baked out includes the normal bump surface detail? i was try many way but the result is a baked lowpoly with MR Ambient Occlusion but not have a normal bump detail ,
Thank you

[benclark]

I'm not sure I understand your question

do you mean you want an ambient occlusion bake that includes the normal map details? If thats what you're after then its covered in the last section of the tutorial.

[glynnsmith]

Originally Posted by Kawin_cfc

how to use a normal bump with the render to texture MR Ambient Occlusion map so that the ambient light baked out includes the normal bump surface detail? i was try many way but the result is a baked lowpoly with MR Ambient Occlusion but not have a normal bump detail ,
Thank you

This tutorial is dealing with Light Tracer, not Mental Ray.

To try and answer your question, I'm unsure as to whether it's even possible to use a normal map to bake in Ambient Occlusion, seeing as a normal map varies the surface angles of your geometry and contains no depth information at all.

You can do it with a bump/height map quite easily and, of course, your high res source mesh. Is there any reason why you can't you use the mesh you baked the normal map from to get the Amb Occ bake? If you used a bump/height map to convert into a normal, just use the original bump map you made.

G

[Kawin_cfc]

because i want to try another way to create an AO map from lowpoly with normal bump instead use the very high poly in MAX

thank you for every answer

ps. sorry about my english skill may be it make you confuse

[benclark]

woops, sorry Kawin_cfc I saw the thread title and thought this was the Maya AO tutorial apologies

[Nysuatro]

Srry for the noob question, so am I right when i say that we use the AOmap for depth in our texture ?

Edit: srry I just found my answer in the hard surface tutorial

[kratos]

Thank you, thank you, thank you .. tried all the other AO tuts but couldn't get some decent results