I have a selection of buildings which i wish to bake some AO into using the vertex information rather than baking the occlusion into the textures as they do not have their own unique UV coordinates. It appears that the only way to do this in max 8 is to bake your vertex illumination using a radiosity solution in the…
The latests versions of xNormal(3.14 or above) can bake the AO to a map or also to vertex colors. The xNormal default software renderer only renders maps. The GPU AO tool can render ao maps or per-vertex ao. If you want to bake it to vertex colors you need to look for the "Simple GPU AO Tool section". If you press the…
Is there a specific reason it needs to be baked into the vertex color channel? Maybe I don't understand what you're trying to do but it sounds like you want to treat the vertex color channel like a separate UV channel so it stores shadow info? And you want to keep your mesh low poly without sub dividing it? How do you plan…
If you bake from mr into a bitmap, you can then use Vertex Paint to convert the map into vertex colors. You still need unique UVs, but you can just do an auto-unwrap and toss it when you're done. Anyhow, Vig's right, you still need well-placed verts to pull off vert lighting.
did you have a look at the external programs faogen or xnormal? they can bake AO into vertex data. I've only tried faogen but it works like a charm. http://www.rusteddreams.net/faogen.html http://www.xnormal.net/
Vig: Maya has a "batch bake (mental ray)" option, and you can choose to bake occlusion to a map, or directly to the vertex colors of the selected mesh, which is quite nice. You get the same result using Eric's method in Max, but it is a few extra steps.
Thanks for the reply, unfortunately these both still need you to subdivide the mesh in order to calculate the radiosity solution which is really time consuming in comparison to just overiding all of your materials with a AO shader, not to mention it takes a while to get the perfect solution as every model is different.…
Haha Frubes now I am confused, I have no idea what you want or not want (been using the MR AO bake to vertex so I am familiar with the results you seem to expect). However yuo might want to give Xnormal a closer look as it *does* have the ability to bake to verts (used it last monday) Search for the GPU AO tool in the help…
http://www.digitaltutors.com/digital_tutors/video.php?v=815 Thats an example of it working in mental ray/Maya. Its pretty much what im looking for but a way of doing it in max without having to go through the exstensive process of calculating a radiosity solution for each building. (Obviously hes doing it on a high res…