Using Ambient Occlusion maps in Unreal Engine 4

kevingamerartist

Hi all,
So I have a quick question about using Ambient Occlusion maps in Unreal Engine 4. So I plug my Ambient Occlusion map into the Ambient Occlusion node in the Material Editor, however it almost looks like nothing is happening. Do I need to put the Ambient Occlusion map in Photoshop and set the AO map to Multiply on top of the Diffuse map? If so would I then plug that map into both the Basic Color and Ambient Occlusion nodes in the Material Editor?

Any help and clarification on this is greatly appreciated. Thank you

Neox

are you by any chance looking at your asset from the lit side? check it in the shadowed side

ZacD

Try putting a constant grey into the base color and roughness, and then see if you can see the AO detail. Like Neox said, AO in UE4 doesn't show up on well lit parts of the mesh, and really only in shadowed areas, that is more physically accurate.

3DBoogieBr

So i have the same problem here. I'm using packed textures to deliver Roughness (Red Channel) Ambient Occlusion ( Green Channel) and Cavity in Blue Channel. 

I already setup the texture node to be masked instead of color. And my packed texture its already in Maked mode instead of DXT compression. 

But i still not having the AO effect. My scene have pre-computed light turned off ( lightmaps), but i can't see any results. Even if i turn unlit mode and AO in the G-Buffer. Its just not happening. 

I dig a bit this subject over the internet, and its not clear for me. Not even at UE4 forum. I just can't find anything too. 

What i want is Baked AO map to work, not only SSAO from PPV.  

This is an old post, but kevin, did you solve that? 

Obscura

It does work but it will show more in indirect lighting, so in shadows, and less in lit areas. I tried it out now and this works with dynamic lighting as well.

If you don't want it to work like that, because you want it to show everywhere, you can just multiply it on the base color, instead of plugging it into the ao slot...

leleuxart

3DBoogieBr said:

So i have the same problem here. I'm using packed textures to deliver Roughness (Red Channel) Ambient Occlusion ( Green Channel) and Cavity in Blue Channel. 

I already setup the texture node to be masked instead of color. And my packed texture its already in Maked mode instead of DXT compression. 

But i still not having the AO effect. My scene have pre-computed light turned off ( lightmaps), but i can't see any results. Even if i turn unlit mode and AO in the G-Buffer. Its just not happening. 

I dig a bit this subject over the internet, and its not clear for me. Not even at UE4 forum. I just can't find anything too. 

What i want is Baked AO map to work, not only SSAO from PPV.  

This is an old post, but kevin, did you solve that? 

How is your scene lit? AFAIK, material AO is limited as to what is occluding it when you're not using baked lighting due to a limited GBuffer size. A moveable skylight and ambient cubemap are 2 things that come to mind that don't affect AO and it won't be rendered if the scene is lit only by those.

Joopson

3DBoogieBr said:

Even if i turn unlit mode and AO in the G-Buffer. Its just not happening. 

So, I can't say for sure, but I don't think it should show up in unlit mode, and I think the AO G-Buffer is only for SSAO.

At any rate, everyone here is right. It should only show up in not directly lit places. If you're unhappy with that, there are ways to get it to work the way you want, but they won't be physically correct.