Im working on a VR project for industrial visualisation.
Alot of the content are metal machine parts created from cad drawings but with reduced polygons. In order for these to look good I need AO, and dynamic AO is too slow for VR.
I did a test where I generated the AO maps from external 3d packages and used them in my materials which looked very good. However that method is too time consuming to be used in the rest of the project, so Im looking into generating and baking ao maps in unreal. I´ve trying to use “generate ambient occlusion material mask” under world settings, but im having trouble getting the desired results.
Can someone please explain the process to me, and how I am supposed to use the precomputedAOmask in my materials?
Thanks!
You’ll need to use the precomputedAOmask node in the material. From there, you could just use it like any other alpha channel map. You could plug it straight into the AO material channel, you could use it as a multiplier for the diffuse color, etc etc. The point is that it will give you the AO mask you need. Make sure the proper lightmass settings are enabled though. You will have to do some playing around with it all, but this is the basic gist of it. This will only work on static meshes that don’t move because they are the only meshes that will get lightmaps. You might even be able to use the render target nodes to output the file so that you can clip the whole ao computing part out of the material.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/ExpressionReference/Constant/#precomputedaomask