From the course: 3ds Max: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

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Generating cavity and occlusion maps with Render Surface Map

Generating cavity and occlusion maps with Render Surface Map - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

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Generating cavity and occlusion maps with Render Surface Map

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- A common shading workflow for games, virtual worlds, and other realtime applications is to pre-render ambient occlusion or cavity map data. Then that map data can be combined with other shading components. For example, the ambient occlusion or cavity map can be multiplied with the diffuse or base color to darken the mesh in recessed areas. The map data is dependent on the mesh object's topology, and so, just as with vertex color operations, we need to make sure the mesh is completed before we get to this step. The ambient occlusion or cavity map can be optionally baked into their own vertex color channels. In the standard workflow, I'm going to demonstrate using the render surface map tool. We need to generate bitmap files, even if we don't end up using them as final assets in our game engine. In this case, rendering bitmaps is an intermediate step. I'm building on what we did last week, which was to bake a complex…

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