Baking ao for mechanical stuff for animation

PanzerWolf

As title says, i'm wondering what would be best way to bake somewhat complex mechanical machinery in way that would be in-game animation friendly. I'm creating kind-of-a mech with hydraulic legs, bending hydraulics hoses and jointed armor plates, and am hoping to animate it and take it to either UE or unity for renders. Biggest problem now seems to be ao bake, for both engine itself and substance tools. Normals and curvatures i can just fine explode and bake in parts, but how to tackle the problem of ao (and to some extent cavity) when good chunk of parts can and will move and rotate in relation to each other? What about hydraulics cylinders that can retract and expand? 

Obscura

There is no good solution for this, other than the exploded bake, at least at the problematic pieces. But modern real time renderers has some screen space ambient occlusion solutions that runs and updates at real time. That would nicely put back the missing shadows. Some of them are even able to pick up details from normal maps. They also have several settings to tweak so its actually pretty good even compared to the baked ao.

I'm not sure if Unity has a good one by default, but Unreal and Toolbag has, and to be honest, on a fully animated mechanical thing such as a mech, I'm not sure if I would even bother with using a baked ao map, and I'd likely rely on the real time one that serves very well what it intended to.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/AmbientOcclusion/

Revel

Hey few days ago I'm wondering about the same issue. Currently I'm modeling a gun with some interior parts and just wondering how should I bake the AO later. For me though, the final presentation will be in TB3.

What I'm planning for now is just to get a good exploded bake for Substance Painter to work on (to generate various maps etc) and let TB3 handle the "real" AO. Not sure how this will looks though, just need to try and test later on when I finish with the UVs.

@Obscura - do you have any experience with SSAO in TB3 before? I don't remember any specific setting for SSAO in TB other then the slider on render tab..

ActionDawg

Rendering with TB3, you should not need SSAO. Instead use the new voxelization bounce light features Might as well use the real deal instead of fakery.

That said, there is a good argument to be made for still including material AO which cannot be captured with SSAO or simply high quality indirect lighting. Micro cracks, porous materials and the like. Even though some SSAO techniques can see normals, the precision of fine grain material AO cannot be rivaled.

ZacD

If you are using UE4, capsule shadows might work. I've used them for a making a ceiling fan cast soft indirect shadows. But they are situational, and I don't know if they self shadow well. 

 You would still want to bake the cavity maps, but of each part by themselves, and you can put that in the AO of the material.