Ambient Occlusion using Light Baking Technique?

[shivanangel]

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?

[Veleno]

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.

[shivanangel]

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

~George