AO Bake texture too dark

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1

Hello all,

To make a long story short, I am trying to bake an AO texture file and export it (these textures are for in-game use, not rendering), but the AO map is coming back a bit too dark (ie. not enough lighting). All the normals are set correctly, and only the piece in question is visible in the viewport and render mode (both the camera and the eye icon are disabled for all objects except this one). There are no artifacts or glitches in the AO texture, it’s just a bit too dark and low contrast for what I’m looking for.

In older versions of Blender (around 2.70-ish) there was an option called “Falloff” in the bake screen, that made the whole texture come out lighter and with less contrast, or darker with more contrast. I have found a similar option using the Texture Nodes, but I think that only affects the AO intensity on the viewport itself, and not of the exported textures.

Is there any way to modify the contrast of the exported textures? I have played around with the settings in the Render and the World tab, but nothing seems to affect the brightness/contrast of the exported texture.

I guess I could also use Photoshop to edit the textures after they’ve been exported, but I’d like to do this in Blender if possible.

Thanks in advance

2

Welcome!

There are 2 ways to bake AO.

  • You can use the AO node in the material editor, plug it in the emissive channel and then bake the emissive map.

  • You can use the bake AO feature. If you go this route, the AO’s falloff will be controlled by the AO settings in the “fast GI approximation” tab of the render settings. Fast GI is the only feature of Cycles where AO is used (outside of materials), so it’s where Cycles’ main AO settings are located. So even if fast GI is not active, the AO settings in this tab still affect the bake, I would agree it’s not very intuitive.

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3

Thank you so much!
Using the Fast GI Approximation tab and fiddling around with the settings was exactly what I was looking for. I agree though, it’s not very intuitive that the settings are still used, even if the checkbox is not active.

Thanks once again!

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