AO for animated meshes

[Stan`]

I've been looking for that for a long time and I finally found a solution. As some of you may know the game engine doesn't support animated mesh with AO. So you have to make the Ao part of the texture. Problem is, no face should be overlapping, and therefore you must use only once the same texture space. This is easier if you have made the texture, but can be quite tricky if the texture is commonly used by all the buildings of the game. When you bake the AO you use a special UVMap usually with "Smart UV project" as shown on the image below :

Usually your UV looks like this :

With my trick they will look like that :

With the last one, you'll just have to open gimp paste the AO you baked with the same UV as multiply layer, and export. Nothing more.

So how to get this :

1. Unwrap your model with the default texture

2. Add a second unwrap layer with the first image parameters

3. Add a new material to your mesh using the texture.

4. Go to render and chose bake texture :

5. Voilà ! Export your texture and do the final step in gimp.

[Enrique]

You forget to mention the incovenients of using this approach (which is why it isn't used in the game)

Smaller uv islands means less texels per polygon (less texture definition). That means much blurrier textures unless you use very big textures and one for each object, which the game will need to load in memory.

This approach is good for smaller entities that need to be animated or other cases where there are more benefits than the incovenients mentioned above

[Stan`]

Thank you for clarifying