Ambient Occlusion maps are always a pain to get good ones generated for games.  And lately since the normal map creation in mudbox is top notch, I think alot of people in this industry could benefit from having ao maps generate in mudbox at the same time.  Right now you have to deal with the problem of pulling a multi million poly objects into xsi or maya to get a ao map, since those programs are not really made to handle that high of poly count and you can run into errors or memory issues, which I do everyday.  I know alot of people use a workflow from normal maps in mudbox then aos in xsi and this would save us alot of time by just creating the maps in the same package.  If you could get a AO feature in this software you will have alot of happy developers:)

till they add it in
(if u r not using a 3D application to create the AO)
ther is this

http://www.crazybump.com/

aSh
http://www.PixelCG.com

Thanks for the link.  Crazybump has a purpose, but not exactly what I want to use to generate high quality ao maps.  I seem to get the best looking ones out of XSI at the moment, but would be a great addition to mudbox.  There doesnt seem to be to many programs out there that can generate a decent ao at the moment.  Heres a sample of what I get out of xsi and would love to see from mudbox also.

	Attachment

that is a very intresting looking AO
the occlusion or the “dirt” is so smooth..almost like silk
the reaon I say so
the AO that I’m used to is like this
http://www.pixelcg.com/blog/?p=14

aSh
http://www.PixelCG.com

that is a very intresting looking AO
the occlusion or the “dirt” is so smooth..almost like silk
the reaon I say so
the AO that I’m used to is like this
http://www.pixelcg.com/blog/?p=14

That’s one hell of a setup to get proper looking AO.

I do agree with DDavis though, it would indeed be nice if Mudbox had an AO baking module.
XSI’s ultimapper/rendermap are fantastic tools, but the AO can be soooooo bloody slow (if you’re baking at 64> samples). Unless you have access to a few extra render nodes.

“Men honor what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it”
--Chuang Tzu

http://www.maphart.com
http://maph.cgsociety.org/gallery/

The next update of Topogun will have occlusion baking.  It will also have a non destructive workflow with Mudbox.

hat is a very intresting looking AO
the occlusion or the “dirt” is so smooth..almost like silk

If I turn the quality down in xsi it would be more grainy looking like yours. 

XSI’s ultimapper/rendermap are fantastic tools, but the AO can be soooooo bloody slow

Oh man tell me about it. Right now I loose a full work day to generate all the AO maps in xsi for a character with alot of parts.

The next update of Topogun will have occlusion baking. It will also have a non destructive workflow with Mudbox.

Hmm… I will have to check that out, I know when i was at EA and now at SEGA we are always searching for a new way to pull AO maps.  Just because the options are small and the ones at the moment that does a nice job are painly slow.

We would like AO generation in Mudbox as well. We recently found a (new to us) trick that dramatically sped up generation time. Times went from 40min a map to about 6min, for nearly the same quality and have yet to have a memory error.  Works in Mental Ray for Maya, and would be curious to see if it works in XSI.

Basically, turn on Final Gather first and set the rays to 1000-2000 or so to adjust the quality, set filter to whatever, we used 2. Then setup the Occlusion Baking like you normally would, and hit go.  We were rendering at twice the size and scaling down to make it a bit smoother, but you could also up the rays to get better results. Would be curious to see if others find this helpful, and if it would work in XSI or Max.

Hope this helps....
-unparent

Oh man tell me about it. Right now I loose a full work day to generate all the AO maps in xsi for a character with alot of parts.

You and me both buddy. Using a few extra CPU’s can make a tremendious difference, but at most times it’s still slow.

2 cores: 2k | 128 samples | medium quality -> approx 2hours
10 cores: 2k | 128 samples | medium quality -> approx 20 minutes (but that’s still a very long coffee break :D )

“Men honor what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it”
--Chuang Tzu

http://www.maphart.com
http://maph.cgsociety.org/gallery/

Just tried in Xsi.  Xsi doesnt seem to have enough options in ultimapper to allow you to fine tweak:(

yes ao und cavity maps would be really a nice feature…

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/christoph-schaedl/6/558/73b