3dsMax Ambient Occlusion

Community Forums/Developer Stations/3dsMax Ambient Occlusion

Gabriel(Posted 2008) [#1]
I know you can use 3dsMax's lighttracer or Mental Ray to bake an ambient occlusion map, but I'm already using four textures on most of my geometry and I don't want to go any higher. And if I were to swizzle one of the existing maps and put the ambient occlusion map in one of the alpha channels, I would still need another texture lookup because of the different UV coordinates.

Is there a way to generate an ambient occlusion term and bake that into the vertex colors or something along those lines?


chwaga(Posted 2008) [#2]
you could write your own script in maxscript, but i didn't even know AO maps existed lol.


Gabriel(Posted 2008) [#3]
I guess I could, but I have no experience with MaxScript whatsoever, so I'm not particularly optimistic that I would be able to figure it out in a reasonable timeframe. I understood that there was some way to bake a lighting solution to a texturemap and then extract vertex colors back from the lightmap, but I haven't been able to find out how you do that or where I should be looking.


North(Posted 2008) [#4]
Usually AO is placed in the diffuse (not color) channel of a material.
Now depending on the material system you are using you can put it in the proper channel or fake the look by multiplying it with the color channel and just using that?


chi(Posted 2008) [#5]
Collapse Radiosity

only vertex color -> no lightmaps ;)



with realtime shadow...





cheers, chi


chwaga(Posted 2008) [#6]
nice, but whats the wire of that scene? (gotcha)


Naughty Alien(Posted 2008) [#7]
..what Im doing is to render out GI maps(inclusive ambient occlusion) and then just export it as a small texture (512x512) for whole level, and generate shadows in real time...its looks outstanding..


chi(Posted 2008) [#8]
1916 tris (barrel á 188 tris)

thats clear... more subdivision -> more details for radiosity
but still you can get some nice results with less subdivison

see here: