Possible tip: Occlusion for texture maps

[OlaHaldor]

This is not a tutorial, just a tip I came to think about in this very moment. I'm doing some 3D animation of elements for motion graphics from time to time, and I'm about to do some rendering with ambient occlusion, and then it hit me - most airplanes created in 3D Max, blender, or whatever you guys use, usually have a rather flat texture wrapped around the polygons.

What if you baked the ambient occlusion as a texture which can be used as a base layer for shadingon the textured UV? I think it would provide realistic results.

[tkyler]

Yes it would and indeed SHOULD be done.  The MU-2 and all of Javier's stuff have baked ambient occlusion.  I myself usually go one further and bake a radiosity solution too to give me a bit of extra flexibility.  Blender has only recently added baking of ambient occlusion but few authors know about it....and Studio Max well...it's almost 4000.00 and not many developers use it for x-plane.  I suspect you'll see more of it in the future though.

[gilbenl]

ABSOLUTELY DO AMBIENT OCCLUSION! If done correctly, it makes life a heck of a lot easier, and permits the paint artist to spend more time on nicks, wear spots, and other fine details, without really having to deal with shading. What's more, is that blender used to be limited to 15 or so samples...not anymore...in the VC I am doing now, the vast majority of parts are being sampled at 20 to 24 depending on the object, and MAN it looks AMAZING. As I said, I am actually in the process of doing some ambient occlusion on a project, so I will be posting a tutorial for this process in Blender sometime today.

Nick

[Rafael Fernandez]

Im working on my VC and Im still learning how to bake my knobs and switches but I plan on doing this method with a little help.

[gilbenl]

http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=151.0

That's all you need.