Ambient occlusion map

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EarthQuake's Baking Method

Joe Wilson aka EarthQuake's method for baking ambient occlusion.

1. UV your low-res mesh.
2. Make a copy of low-res mesh.
3. Explode both the copied low-res and the high-res.
4. Save out the original low-res mesh.
5. Bake the ambient occlusion from the exploded meshes.
6. Load up the final low-res mesh in the Simple AO tool and bake at the same resolution as your other textures.
7. Composite this image in with the other ambient occlusion texture, edit out the shadows on parts that need to move etc.

This could also be done with 3ds Max or another program if you don't like the quality of the Simple AO tool for low-res meshes. I usually blur the map a little and spend a few seconds painting out errors. Also be sure to make a layer mask for parts of your mesh that would need to move, so they don't get ambient occlusion on them.

Theres actually a few extra practical advantages to doing it this way as well:

1. When using floating geometry, you'll often get AO artifacts that you need to paint out, if your mesh is exploded and you have separate layers for high and low frequency AO its easier and quicker to paint out these errors that it is when you have the small shadows along with the large shadows both in the same texture.
2. Matching the exact silhouette of the low-poly is actually a more desirable result than that of the high-poly. Example: You have a 32 sided cylinder intersecting with some other shape, if you bake the AO directly from the high-res you'll get a perfectly round shape. If you bake it from the low-res you'll get a shape that actually fits your model instead of just hurting the mesh by point out how jagged your low-res really is (via the contrast from the 12 sided guy casting a perfectly round shadow, not matching up correctly etc.).

Images of what goes into my lightmap for a texture:

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