I love having AO as a map and have always baked it out individually. Using it in materials and combining it with diff gives the result a pop which you can also dial in to suit. If you can afford it why not use it?
having a separate AO texture means you can also use tiled textures a tiled texture with baked ambient can look a tad strange. Obviously it modern world of humongous textures it's not as common as it once was it's still useful to have.... other reason could be you want to animate the diffuse again it would look odd if baked…
i might be wrong but in ue5, if you are using lumen, you wouldn't need AO map (not for actual ambient occlussion anyway, it's still useful map for many creative texturing needs)
Agree it’s objectively better if you’re using full global illumination. Then you’re getting reactive bounces and accumulation and occlusion, yippee! But I think we’re talking about real-time rendering here, which is all about shortcuts, like using baked occlusion, and deciding how you want to mix it in your shader. At…
Q: I'm struggling to understand why AO needs to be it's own map in modern renderers.A: It doesn't need to be. There is no hard rule that says you have to do it this one way. Depends on the project needs. Q: Is it only relevant for baked lighting in Unity/UE?A: It's commonly used to simulate ambient occlusion. Again, no…
The main difference in between having separate AO channel vs having it baked into color texture (albedo/base color ) is that in typical real-time render AO will be seen only inside shadows or under cloudy overcast lighting. On directly illuminated by sun sides of things you typically wouldn't see any AO. It's actually how…
It's not the same thing and they're not mutually exclusive Baking specular occlusion into a texture is the same as baking ambient occlusion into a texture - you do it so you can insert information that doesn't exist in your meshes into the lighting system. The bent normal stuff is about manipulating the surface normals…
You may also need occlusion as a separate texture from packed rough-metal, if using a fixed function renderer and the user wants to tile metal-rough but not tile occlusion. glTF renderers typically work this way.