The xNormal default software renderer only renders maps. The latest versions of xNormal (3.14 or above) can bake the AO to a map or also to vertex colors. 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. This tool creates a bitmap instead of vertex color, however you can use the Vertex Paint modifier to convert any bitmap into vertex color. The tool was part of Polyboost but is now called Graphite Modeling Tools. Surface map rendering tool included in 3dsmax 2010, found in the Rendering menu as "Render Surface Map". Re-Use Direct Illumination from Radiosity Solution.Radiosity Processing Parameters Rollout:.Advanced Lighting rollout, set to Radiosity.For additional methods, see the thread Baking Vertex Illumination without using radiosity on the Polycount forum. The simplest way to bake vertex color AO in 3ds Max is to use Radiosity. Pits & Peaks Maxscript by Jeff Stewart was written for Max 3.1 but still works. GPU AO Vertex Color plugin by Yang Zhang is 22 times faster than CPU, but requires a Nvidia 8 series or later graphic card and 3ds Max 9 or later.
More edges can be added to the model, but it usually requires a tedious manual process.ĬryEngine2 uses vertex color for baked ambient occlusion, see the Sandbox Manual. The less vertices there are, the less precise the shading will be. The downside of vertex color is that AO resolution is dependent on the complexity of the mesh. In this case texture-based AO would require a separate non-tiled texture using a second set of UVs, which would increase the texture memory and also increase the vertex count for the model (to store the 2nd set of UVs). Vertex color AO works well for meshes that use tiled textures, like environment models, because the tiling prevents unique lighting from being added to the textures.