I've never really though about this. Why have a separate texture for ambient occlusion? I've seen a few models that have baked the ambient occlusion into the diffuse/color map. What are the pros and cons for combining the AO and diffuse map?
Many reasons, much better control on how you mix it on your diffuse in PS, shader and if they use falloff for a second texture. Generally, you should never bake your AO on your diffuse directly with your renderer, you simple don't have the control you need to make it look good.
Depends on the pipeline and situation. Combining them means one less texture call, which is great. But if the engine is using a physical materials system for instance, a separate AO map is often applied after the gloss pass, so that it affects gloss intensity along with the gloss mask and f0 values. Couldn't do that if it…
Hmmmm baking AO into albedo texture is pretty wrong from physical point of view. AO should really only be used to mask indirect lighting and increase saturation via inter-reflectance I guess. Moving forward with games starting to be more conscious of physical correctness and PB systems, probably going to see more "AO"…
pixar has all the time in the world to render a frame, i do not doubt that a lot of the next generation engines are physically based, but it doesn't mean that nothing is still going to be faked. As for the lighting in diffuse, if it looks better ingame in 90% of the cases do it. Its all a matter of the game, the usual…
Cool, let's all go back to painting our lighting into diffuse textures... Physically based isn't as limiting as you make out. Pixar made Wreck-it-Ralph using a physically based rendering system and that is definitely not a 'realistic' visual result: http://www.ictv.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Wreck-it-Ralph.jpg From…
everyone else? i highly doubt that - we are still far from super advanced shaders for most productions, besides some really high specs games - but even in titles such as crysis 3 the ao was part of the diffuse and not a seperate map. Not sure about the ingame cinematic models - but the normal in game models just have…
Don't know much about what will be the next-gen PS4/XBoxOne will be. But currently, AO overlayed in Diffuse Maps is cheaper on engines. On my workflow I use it to make the look of the model pop out a bit. And physical based AO on more advanced engines tends to spread AO a lot all over the place and really doesn't cover the…