Black AO background?

jeremiah_bigley

Was wonder what you guys thought about setting the background to your AO black instead of white... This would essentially make all spaces inbetween the UV islands black.

Not sure how much this would affect mip mapping seams if you already have your padding. Having it black I think just makes it feel cleaner.

Ace-Angel

Um, is there really a question here at all?

It doesn't matter since you're not going to be using the AO by itself, what matters is the padding and an easy enough color to use in the BG to break it out willy nilly. So black, green, anything that floats your boat I guess.

Kurt Russell Fan Club

It's generally a good idea for bleed area between your islands to be the same colour as the nearest island edge, for filtering and for the mips to look as close to the highest LOD as possible.

But that doesn't mean the area between your islands should be black, they should be the same colour as the nearest (and most important) bleed. That will sometimes be black, often it will be grey or near-white.

r_fletch_r

forget the bg colour, turn up your bleed as far as it will go, this should fill the entire tile with either baked data or bleed space. NO BG

It doesn't matter since you're not going to be using the AO by itself

Yes you are, things like reflection and ambient light masks use the AO raw.

Ace-Angel

r_fletch_r wrote: »

forget the bg colour, turn up your bleed as far as it will go, this should fill the entire tile with either baked data or bleed space. NO BG



Yes you are, things like reflection and ambient light masks use the AO raw.

Wouldn't the AO be fighting the natural lighting in most cases really badly? I was never able to get an AO to work in either cases correctly, since it ends up blowing up the values by alot, so I would resort to manually editing.

Unless I'm missing something?

r_fletch_r

how are you integrating it. AO is a mask it shouldnt be 'blowing up' anything it should be reducing it.

DOG-GY

In Photoshop I like to take a duplicate of my texture, gaussian blur it by the highest amount, make sure it's opaque and then mask out the space between islands. That way I'm getting the averaged colors (there is still some gradation, it isn't a pure, solid color) of the whole texture. It looks much nicer than black or some random color masking out the islands.

NordicNinja

DOG-GY wrote: »

In Photoshop I like to take a duplicate of my texture, gaussian blur it by the highest amount, make sure it's opaque and then mask out the space between islands. That way I'm getting the averaged colors (there is still some gradation, it isn't a pure, solid color) of the whole texture. It looks much nicer than black or some random color masking out the islands.

Wouldn't it work better to make a few duplicates with a lower blur amount (duplicate + modest blur. Then duplicate that + modest blur again ect.)? That way instead of having an averaged color of the entire map you get the blurred bleed with the colors close to their respective shells.

DOG-GY

NordicNinja wrote: »

Wouldn't it work better to make a few duplicates with a lower blur amount (duplicate + modest blur. Then duplicate that + modest blur again ect.)? That way instead of having an averaged color of the entire map you get the blurred bleed with the colors close to their respective shells.

Yes, though the difference isn't really that huge if you already have good edge padding. It's mainly just to put it on something similar to local colors and not black, but you're right.

sprunghunt

I keep it black - but I use a mask in photoshop when I apply it to the final diffuse texture.

throttlekitty

I JUST LIKE TO PAINT SLOPPY

Mark Dygert

Isn't the reason the AO background is white so that when you multiply it over things the edges won't accidentally be effect things? Even with proper edge padding I don't see much sense in switching it to black?

Maybe so you can use it as a mask? Why not render out a solid colored template?

UVW Editor Window > Tools > Render UVW Template


You can even hide UV shells, sort them by mat ID and render out separate templates for different selections. A mask for metal, a mask for leather, a mask for flesh bla bla bla... TexTools also has some interesting ways to create masks from what I remember.

I personally use the template to render out wire and solid colors. Then in Photoshop I have a simple action set up to sort the colors and create masks, its all very easy to step up.