Baking AO With or Without High Poly Assets?

Amank679

Hi guys,

I'm torn about how to go about baking AO. I've recently made my high poly assets in Maya and feel I'm ready to bake AO, but I'm not sure If I should bake off the high poly model or the low poly. 

With the high poly, rendering times will take much longer but since I was going to bake the high poly as normals via Substance Painter, later on, I'm not sure how to go about this.

Please let me know your thoughts!

Thanks in advance!

Udjani

You need to bake the AO from the high ''into'' the lowpoly, just like with normal map. 

gnoop

Of cource hi poly.   With low ply it wouldn't match normal map.     Try GPU render. Knald or Cyles in Blender for example. 

I use Octane. You could bake into hipoly automatic Zbrush unwrap with just any environment lighting   and then re-bake it as a diffuse texture  from hi to low.    Octane also has a cool AI based denoiser ,  super helpful for AO and does it all just in real time.

  it's limited by your GPU memory there although  so might doesn't work for 200 mil hipoly.   

Eric Chadwick

This is a few years old, but still quite valid.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Ambient_occlusion_map#EarthQuake.27s_Baking_Method
Nothing has really changed per what the models need, except for how we keep the AO separate for PBR, instead of combined into diffuse etc.