In this Blender video tutorial, I show you the basics of adding seams to a model, then setting up the Ambient Occlusion and Environment light, then baking them to a texture map, and applying it to the model.
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20 Responses to “Tip: Baking Ambient Occlusion”Leave a Comment
This works good if you set the material to shadeless, but this would only be good for a still frame. Doing an animation, this might not be ideal because the calculations would be different depending on the placement of objects in the scene.
Hey, man! Awesome tip, just learned something useful.
So this is only for still images since AO depends on the location of objects near each other, right? If it’s hard to tell, you can always compare with the render slots (think I got that tip from here as well).
Greets from Belgium,
Claus.
Hi,
you can show this effect at the end, by using the renderslots
maces
Yeah I had the same thought at that moment. Anyway, nice tip David, would you like to advance its explanation applied to the other options of baking in the future? Not necessarily the rather common normal maps but perhaps summarize the rest of the options there and what to use them for. Thank you
This technique is really useful for the game engine. You can bake things like Shadows, AO, Normals, etc. and apply them to stationary objects in the game engine. Excellent tip Mr. Ward
Thanke you so much, first with the Normal Maps tutorial, and now with this one! hope to keep seeing more of this texturing thingis that are really hard to get a hand on to if you dont have tutorials like this.
Thankes David, Thankes Jonathan for the normal maps tut, and Thankes Blender Cookie.
I think to better illustrate the point at the end you could have disabled shadows. Otherwise another addition to an excellent web-site.
Keep it up.
I had problems with the unwrap part. I kept getting really bad uvs as a result. It’s only when I started again with a fresh suzanne monkey head that it finally worked. My seams seemed good, is there anything else that can cause unwrap to give wonky results?
Oh, never mind, I think I know what must have happened. I think I hit the E key by mistake and had extruded poor suzanne without noticing it.
Thanks for the tutorial!
I think it would be helpful for people to know that this is very useful when painting textures.
When painting in an image editor using the exported UV layout, this can be used as a top layer and set to multiply (to keep black only) which makes it easier to judge where elements are. It can also be used as a layer mask for things like rust in the crevices of hard surface objects.
When your texture is finished, save out the image, apply (in blender) as usual by using a texture channel and selecting the new image and using UV mapping co-ordinates.
thanks David for the Quick tip.
Do you need to turn on environment lighting for this to work? Or was that just to be able to see what it does? And if you do need to turn it on, could anyone tell me how to achieve this in 2.49b, if possible?
Thanks
Man, all those goodies… if everything goes well, I’ll have my print graphics degree in 2 days and then I’ll have plenty of time to BLEND again! So just to tell you I’M NOT DEAD!
Quick Tip: You have to turn Face Textures on in the material settings for this to actually come out in a render.
To see just the AO baked UV texture it’s a good idea to turn shadeless on as well.
Most of the tip is accurate and well done, just the last bit was a bit that will confuse a lot of people, the last render in the video wasn’t showing the Ambient occlusion, it was just the standard render, there is a big difference between the AO and a standard render.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/39385369@N06/4788622905/sizes/o/in/photostream/
Whenever I want to bake something, my computer crashes. can anybody help me?
What version of Blender are you using. Have you tried using the latest build from graphicall.org?
Awesome tip! thanks a lot.
Am new to the Blender-scene (came from Cinema4D but am starting to really really like blender).
I deactivated the subsurf modifier afterwards which gets me a nice low poly model with great shadows. Truly great for game development.
Please keep up the good work!
I’ve been wondering what is the Normalized checkbox for under ambient occlusion. It seems to bake the exact same map only lighter and I don’t have to use Divide for blend mode?
This is a great tutorial, learned something I haven’t known before. Something that I think it would be beneficial toto briefly explain how to make the AO map smooth, because by default it will give you that grainy look unless you beef up the sample sizes.
There is a mistake in the video description, it says that the video is made by Jonathan Williamson while it’s made by David Ward.
Thanks for both of you guys and keep it up!
Thanks for the heads up! It’s fixed now
-Jonathan