AO In Unreal Engine

So I Just Noticed that In Ue4 Theres an Option Visualize Ambient Oclusion(AO) So does this mean that we dont have to create AO in the in blender and etc or the visualize AO option is just a rough image of how the AO is going to be?

Might be I understand you wrong but you don’t do AO in your modelling/baking app anymore.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/AmbientOcclusion/index.html

You don’t make diffuse maps, AO maps or bake shadows into your textures but albedo maps where there should be no lightning information in it whatsoever except… albedo.

You can make AO maps and use them in materials also. There’s a slot for the AO texture and the g-buffer reserves space for material AO also. So do use it.

Really? Odd. Is there any specific reason for this?

Where we can find info about this? I always thought it would be stored to gbuffer and used later for all indirect lighting. But this would explain why my visualize material AO is always have been broken.

AO does not affect Direct light which so its not a bug. In the real world if you shine a flashlight into a corner there will be no AO in the corner affecting that light.

The AO only affects the static lightmaps because those are the only type of indirect lighting we really have (aside from a dynamic ambient cubemap which is affected by DFAO similarly).

AO does not affect Direct light which so its not a bug. In the real world if you shine a flashlight into a corner there will be no AO in the corner affecting that light.

The AO only affects the static lightmaps because those are the only type of indirect lighting we really have (aside from a dynamic ambient cubemap which is affected by DFAO similarly).
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One could argue that sky light is also some sort of indirect lighting? Or is this taken caren of by normalization term that indirect specular and skylight use?

Edit: I meant with normalization term this:

"
// We have high frequency directional data but low frequency spatial data in the envmap.
// We have high frequency spatial data but low frequency directional data in the lightmap.
// So, we combine the two for the best of both. This is done by removing the low spatial frequencies from the envmap and replacing them with the lightmap data."

Skylight is indirect yes. In most cases it gets baked to lightmaps and it will be affected by AO.

But how about the the material AO visualization. Is it broken for other too?

I need to double check. At various times it has worked, but I cant remember if its working currently.

You are right though, technically material AO should affect all skylight types but i seem to recall a technical limitation that made it tricky to support since the engine only had a path to easily affect the lightmaps with it.

If you mean just the visualization of mat AO itself, i havent seen it work since prior to 4.8.