Assuming you have screenspace AO (or equivalent) an ambient occlusion texture should look like a cavity map - i.e it should only be dark in cavities and white everywhere else. The screenspace AO takes care of the larger scale ambient occlusion. If the texture is mostly gray, your asset will look darker than it really is under indirect lighting - a situation which often leads to people adjusting the wrong things to compensate.
The occlusion distance you want depends on your game camera - if it's an FPS you want a small range (a few cm), if its a top down game you'll probably want a larger range.
in that picture, 3 and 4 aren't bad but the occlusion distance is probably a bit higher than it could be 2 is awful 1 is kind of ok if you ignore the gradient near the floor
I have a question too. Isn't AO should be clipped withing shadows or clouds shade and under direct light we shouldn't see it at all basically? I always thought it should be working that way. Perhaps just by much more overwhelming sun intensity vs AO or simply by adding shadow map to AO before rendering. So whatever gradient on building1 is it should be seen only in shades?
Yes the direct lighting should remove the AO, however the AO debug view does not take that into account, so it does still happen unless you manually put the AO into the diffuse
The HDRP Micro shadows expect correct AO Maps and will heavily overdo the shadowing if the AO maps are overdone by default. Nr 2 looks the most typically baked, however it has a bad gamma curve applied, similar to how marmosets overdoes the AO bake, and as such covers way too much in dark. Try remove SRGB from the texture at least, that will improve it a bit.
Id definitely recommend having a ground contact like on 1, the issue there is that you did not add AO decals or AO on the ground. The AO of the wall is perfectly fine (maybe a bit strong) but the ground is missing its AO and you should aim to solve this.
Always put AO decals below your objects, it makes a large difference. The contact area between objects is one of the main deciding factors of final visual quality in my opinion.
Here is how it should look ideally This is with SS Raytracing
(well also not perfect since its covering too much in shadow also) This SSRT does a very surprisingly good job tho on even the tiny details
Here is more the cold reality of realtime lol with ao decals and mixed quality bakes
Looks pretty crap in debug view But in normal game view with SSAO dosnt look half bad and sometimes hard to distinquish, IF you do put proper object contact and proper AO decals.
I guess it was a bit stupid of me to ask this question, when I already have good references, but this was me making that AO map back when I decided to add bent normal maps to every object in the level. It helps to shader objects better in the shadows - maybe that's why I did not see my mistake up until I started using micro shadows. No, I think adding ground contact AO would work for me.
Replies
Assuming you have screenspace AO (or equivalent) an ambient occlusion texture should look like a cavity map - i.e it should only be dark in cavities and white everywhere else. The screenspace AO takes care of the larger scale ambient occlusion.
If the texture is mostly gray, your asset will look darker than it really is under indirect lighting - a situation which often leads to people adjusting the wrong things to compensate.
The occlusion distance you want depends on your game camera - if it's an FPS you want a small range (a few cm), if its a top down game you'll probably want a larger range.
in that picture, 3 and 4 aren't bad but the occlusion distance is probably a bit higher than it could be
2 is awful
1 is kind of ok if you ignore the gradient near the floor
The HDRP Micro shadows expect correct AO Maps and will heavily overdo the shadowing if the AO maps are overdone by default.
Nr 2 looks the most typically baked, however it has a bad gamma curve applied, similar to how marmosets overdoes the AO bake, and as such covers way too much in dark. Try remove SRGB from the texture at least, that will improve it a bit.
Id definitely recommend having a ground contact like on 1, the issue there is that you did not add AO decals or AO on the ground. The AO of the wall is perfectly fine (maybe a bit strong) but the ground is missing its AO and you should aim to solve this.
Always put AO decals below your objects, it makes a large difference. The contact area between objects is one of the main deciding factors of final visual quality in my opinion.
This is with SS Raytracing
(well also not perfect since its covering too much in shadow also)
This SSRT does a very surprisingly good job tho on even the tiny details
Here is more the cold reality of realtime lol with ao decals and mixed quality bakes
Looks pretty crap in debug view
But in normal game view with SSAO dosnt look half bad and sometimes hard to distinquish, IF you do put proper object contact and proper AO decals.
I have an unexpected trick up my sleeve) The level you see was made from a real location:
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.915573,-77.0219884,3a,66.3y,333.03h,85.71t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s4JGrR3Uw1e6_tye-nzbRsA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
I guess it was a bit stupid of me to ask this question, when I already have good references, but this was me making that AO map back when I decided to add bent normal maps to every object in the level. It helps to shader objects better in the shadows - maybe that's why I did not see my mistake up until I started using micro shadows. No, I think adding ground contact AO would work for me.