Dead Tree Mess

Calabi

I'm doing this simple object, going through the process of modelling and texturing etc.

I've got to the stage where I've made an ambient occlusion in xnormal and am previewing it in Unity.

It looks rubbish, what did I do wrong?(apart from everything).

Do I need to add more edges around some of the extreme angles or do I need better uvs?

PredatorGSR

I don't see much point in baking AO for something like this. It is too low poly, and there is no geometry that would benefit from AO. AO is generated by objects being close together and casting light/shadow information, and none of your geometry is close together so there isn't going to be any AO.

RexM

You need to make a normal map with bark detail and generate AO to bake from that.

Calabi

Ah! I see, that might have been why I had problems getting an AO map in the first place.

I was under the impression that you should almost always use AO maps, I guess I was mistaken/confused. I was hoping not to go down the route of normal maps, at least to start, just focusing on diffuse for now.

Thanks for the info.

Sean VanGorder

Also, for baking AO maps, consider where your light source will be coming from in your scene. For instance, it wouldn't make much sense to have shadows from the AO on the top of your branches if the sunlight is hitting it. Just for future reference, since you don't really need an AO map for this model.

divi

there's nothing wrong with baking an ao/lighting map for texturing if it's not going to get normal maps. i'd add a ground plane in there though to get some dark where the trunk meets the ground.
all the seams you have there are either caused by smoothing groups or just by having loads of seams in your UVs. screenshots without the AO would be very useful.