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View Full Version : Anyone ever baked AO?

Vilandra
07-31-2006, 08:53 PM
I have a pretty big scene of a city (2.5 million polys) and I want to do a couple fly-thru animations, but with GI or AO, the rendertimes would be huge, and I dont want to keep my PC tied up with hours and hours of render time, so I thought about baking some AO (or perhaps GI) into my city.

The only problem is the time its taking to bake it. I tested a smaller size model, and I choose the "bake object" instead of "bake texture", and once I started baking, it said "1 of 466", and it took 1 hour to bake the first one, then moved on to the second. Does this mean that its going to take close to 466 hours to bake the AO into my scene?

I wonder if im even doing it correctly. I thought maybe it would have baked the entire object in 1 hour, but it said "1 of 466". There is no way im baking it if its going to take that long.

Anyone have any other ideas?
FredSpeaks
07-31-2006, 09:33 PM
I have tested it on a project I just completed to see how to work it into my next project. I found that you can get better control by baking textures. You can control the texture size yourself, for small objects you can do a smaller res texture, while objects that are larger or have more detail, you can increase the res. I haven't experienced any of the problems that others have had... all my AO textures have baked out fine.
rsquires
08-01-2006, 06:28 AM
Your "object" would appear to be made up of 466 seperate objects. Each one of them has to be rendered individually, which will take forever.

If it's a city scape I would suggest taking 4 or 5 buildings and doing a seperate AO pass for each. You will have to make sure that the UV maps are good, so you don't get tearing. Then place the texture you get from baking in the diffuse channel of your buildings. This way you will get ambient occlusion that's controllable and renders very quickly, and allows you to light the buildings if need be. Duplicate your 4-5 buildings into a cityscape.

Maybe it's an idea to start out simple to see how it works. Then you can work out a workflow that will enable you to do the cityscape. Have you thought of using a dome light setup
Antosha Marchenko
08-01-2006, 07:19 AM
Stop It. Don`t bake AO !!! :)
Baking GI is all ways better.
Several times faster and produces less artifacts.

... sorry for my english
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08-01-2006, 07:19 AM
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