Baking ambient occlusion maps using low-poly only?
polycounter lvl 11
Hello, I just wanted to ask if there was anybody like me who does something like this when working with just low-poly models. I know that the proper way is to bake the high-poly geometry over the low-poly, but because I tend to stick with low-poly modeling only, I tried using the same low-poly model to bake the AO to see what would happen. This was using xNormal.
I do this to get a quick and easy layer of shadows for when I am creating textures so I can concentrate on painting the main diffuse colours without thinking about the shadow aspect of it yet. I have found that every time I bake low-poly on low-poly, it comes out with some rough lines in some parts for the shadows (kind of like it was shaded in pencil on a sketchbook paper) and with some artifacts on parts that have intersecting geometry. Usually I can see areas shaded with noticeable triangular edges. Other parts tend to be very dark if there is other geometry covering it. What I do is clean up those artifacts and smooth out those edges in PS to get a cleaner simple layer of shadows that I can set to Multiply to help achieve more depth. Otherwise, my hand-painted textures will look very flat. However, I am looking for a better way to bake a nice, cleaner AO map without necessarily requiring a high-poly mesh just to speed up my workflow a little.
So am I crazy or bad for doing this, or are there others who do interesting things like this too, to discover different kinds of secret techniques? Thanks.
I do this to get a quick and easy layer of shadows for when I am creating textures so I can concentrate on painting the main diffuse colours without thinking about the shadow aspect of it yet. I have found that every time I bake low-poly on low-poly, it comes out with some rough lines in some parts for the shadows (kind of like it was shaded in pencil on a sketchbook paper) and with some artifacts on parts that have intersecting geometry. Usually I can see areas shaded with noticeable triangular edges. Other parts tend to be very dark if there is other geometry covering it. What I do is clean up those artifacts and smooth out those edges in PS to get a cleaner simple layer of shadows that I can set to Multiply to help achieve more depth. Otherwise, my hand-painted textures will look very flat. However, I am looking for a better way to bake a nice, cleaner AO map without necessarily requiring a high-poly mesh just to speed up my workflow a little.
So am I crazy or bad for doing this, or are there others who do interesting things like this too, to discover different kinds of secret techniques? Thanks.
Replies
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/GradientMapping
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Ambient_occlusion_vertex_color
If you use the VertexPaint modifier in 3ds Max, you can use the Blur function to soften the hard transitions.
You can convert vertex color into a bitmap using Render To Texture, or Xnormal.
I have another question. How does one expand a mesh in Maya again (and subdivide it nicely)? I think I want to try creating a pseudo-high poly version and test out baking AO using that. I also would like to know for future cel-shading projects, where the mesh is duplicated and expanded, normals reversed and have a black material applied.
http://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2016/ENU/?guid=GUID-8A5D0FF0-9BA1-435F-A4CA-53183311B819