3D WORKSHOP: Baking AO Maps for Terrain Using Blender 3D Introduction
Applying a material to the terrain mesh
What are ambient occlusion maps?
The mesh needs a material and that material needs a filled texture slot. AO baking relies on the presence of a texture image when done in relation to game/3D content creation.
Ambient Occlusion maps - or AO bakes, as they are more commonly known - are a useful way to generate 'shadows' for an object based on ambient light; this is the background and indirect lighting that illuminates objects in the world around us. For game and 3D media content, using ambient occlusion adds 'depth' and 'substance' to an object that may not otherwise be possible using other methods of in-game lighting. In 3D this can be represented by rendering a scene based ambient occlusion and 'baking' that to an image; the process tries to approximate the same non-directional lighting on objects in 3D space that happens in the real world by writing (baking) a gray scale image to memory (file) based on the physical characteristics of the model being processed.
HOW TO : apply a material to the terrain mesh Select the mesh first, then go in to the Shading buttons panel [F5] and either create a new material or edit the default one that's present. Once done add a texture image slot by clicking on the "Texture buttons" icon [F6] and again either add a new slot or edit the default one present (should be named "Tex" if present). Browse to the image, select and add it, it will then appear in the texture slot preview window (shown bottom left of the image below).
By Ken 'kat' Beyer
How to bake ambient occlusion maps
www.blenderart.org
It's quite simple to bake Ambient Occlusion (AO) maps using Blender, but there are a couple of things that need to be done in order for it to work correctly and yield the best possible results. The following tutorial has been written with Blender 2.46 in mind; the only major deviation from previous versions of Blender for AO baking is that UVW maps are now done in EDIT mode [TAB] instead of FACE EDIT mode [F] as previously.
Fig. 1: The raw mesh ready to be set up for AO baking. A material is applied with a texture slot.
Issue 18 | Sep 2008 - Landscapes, Environments & Sets
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