Baking to Vertex Colors

[JulianT_CD]

Hi guys,

I want to bake AO to vertex colors in order to use that as a lightweight AO solution in Unity. Is it possible to do that with VRay? If so, what would be the workflow?

In case this isn't possible, can anybody explain how to accomplish this goal with e.g. mental ray or the old Scanline renderer?

Thank you so much!

Julian

[mohammadreza_mohseni]

Hi guys,

I want to bake AO to vertex colors in order to use that as a lightweight AO solution in Unity. Is it possible to do that with VRay? If so, what would be the workflow?

In case this isn't possible, can anybody explain how to accomplish this goal with e.g. mental ray or the old Scanline renderer?

Thank you so much!

Julian

There are so many ways.
you can use radiosity (3dsmax not vray) to bake ao in vertex colors. (there were some tutorial on this one and you can search for them)
you can use xnormal with using simple ao tools or faogen and it's 3dsmax script
you can use pit-peak script in 3dsmax
you can use any other pakage with baking ao capability (like quixel ddo, or even render to texture baking ao using mentalray or vray, etc) and use assaing vertex color utility or MapToVColor free plugin to bake it to vertex channel.

[JulianT_CD]

Thank you so much for your awesome response!

There are so many ways.
you can use radiosity (3dsmax not vray) to bake ao in vertex colors. (there were some tutorial on this one and you can search for them)

I'm working with CAD geometry (8+ mio vertices). It would probably take a long time until a Radiosity solution (due to the necessary subdivision of the geo) is computed if it doesn't crash Max before.

you can use xnormal with using simple ao tools or faogen and it's 3dsmax script

Yes I got it to work with XNormal. The only problem: It only exports the baked geo as SBM file. And that file format completely discards all material assignments. that means I would have to assign all 100+ materials again. Very annoying even though this can probably be solved with a script.

Faogen is also quite nice, but has very limited functionality. Not sure if its worth $70.

you can use pit-peak script in 3dsmax

Ok thanks, I will try that. Seems to be a very old script though. Is it still working reliably?

you can use any other pakage with baking ao capability (like quixel ddo, or even render to texture baking ao using mentalray or vray, etc) and use assaing vertex color utility or MapToVColor free plugin to bake it to vertex channel.

This would require me doing a UV Unwrap which will be very time and memory consuming. It's something I like to avoid and it's one of the major reasons I wanted to bake AO into vertices in the first place.
But thanks for that tipp anyway! This might come useful in other curcumstances.