Ambient Occlusion using Light Baking Technique?
 

Your shader section doesn't cover using Ambient Occlusion.

Back in Vizard 4, I could stick the AO in the self-illumination slot and it works.
Now if I try to do this with Vizard 5 shaders or placing it in the ambient color slot, I get nothing but a washed out surface.

Once I turn off material descriptions, it works fine. But this seems like a problem if I want to mix in AO maps with all the other new features.

Ideas?

Hi shivanangel,

Ambient is the correct slot for it. I'm guessing you're using white as the unoccluded color, correct?

If that's the case, the issue here is that the Vizard 5 shader expects lightmaps used in the slot to be centered on a middle gray. The values in the lightmap are multiplied by 2 before being multiplied by the values of the diffuse texture. This is similar to using the "Self-Illumination Scale" exporter option for the Vizard 4 approach.

For existing maps, this can be fairly quickly fixed by running them through a Photoshop batch process that halves their values (e.g. with Levels). For new baked maps, set the range to go from black to 50% gray instead of black to white.

Thank you!
I'll give it a shot later today.
Learning some new things, but loving the new shader support.

~George