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Ambient Occlusion | Substance 3D bakers

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Substance Bakers

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  1. Substance 3D home
  2. Home
  3. Getting Started
    1. What is Baking?
    2. Software interface
      1. Substance 3D Painter
      2. Substance 3D Designer
      3. Substance 3D Automation Toolkit
    3. Availability per software
    4. Compatible 3D software
    5. Tutorials
  4. Bakers settings
    1. Common Parameters
    2. Ambient Occlusion
    3. Ambient Occlusion from Mesh
    4. Bent Normals from Mesh
    5. Color Map from Mesh
    6. Convert UV to SVG
    7. Curvature
    8. Curvature from Mesh
    9. Curvature from Mesh (deprecated)
    10. Height Map from Mesh
    11. Normal Map from Mesh
    12. Opacity Mask from Mesh
    13. Position
    14. Position map from Mesh
    15. Thickness Map from Mesh
    16. Transferred Texture from Mesh
    17. World Space Direction
    18. World Space Normals
  5. Guides
    1. Error and Warning Messages
    2. Performances and optimizations
    3. Triangulating before baking
  6. Features
    1. Geometry Cache
    2. GPU Raytracing
    3. Matching by Name
    4. Tangent Space
  7. Common questions
    1. How to export the baked maps?
    2. Is dithering applied to baked textures?
    3. Should I enable "Compute tangent space per fragment"?
    4. What are Assbin files?
    5. What is the bit depth of baked textures?
    6. What is the difference between the OpenGL and DirectX normal format?
    7. Why are there strange stretches in my textures after baking or exporting?
    8. Why is Matching by Name not working with Ambient Occlusion/Thickness?
    9. Why is my mesh fully black after baking?
  8. Common issues
    1. Aliasing on UV Seams
    2. Baker output is fully black or empty
    3. Baking failed with Color Map from Mesh
    4. Black shading cross are visible on the mesh surface
    5. Mesh parts bleed between each other
    6. Normal map has strange colorful gradients
    7. Normal texture looks faceted
    8. Seams are visible after baking a normal texture
    9. Seam visible on every face
    10. Texture baked outside of Substance software looks incorrect

Ambient Occlusion

The Ambient Occlusion baker allows to bake an ambient shadow texture. This baker uses a fast algorithm executed on the GPU.

Available in:

  • Substance Designer
  • Substance Automation Toolkit
Alert:
  • This baker may not be supported on old GPUs.
  • Baking at high resolution on low-end / mobile GPUs can lead to a crash.

Parameters

NameDescription
Normal MapInput normal map file that can be used to provide additional geometry details on the surface of the mesh to be taken into account during the baker computation. This parameter is optional.
World Space

If enabled, specify that the input normal map is in World Space (instead of Tangent Space). If no input normal map is provided, this parameters is ignored/disabled.

Invert NormalCompute the ambient occlusion map with inverted normals (can be used to generate a thickness map).
Use Unselected Mesh PartsUse unselected mesh parts of the mesh to bake the ambient occlusion map.
Quality

Choose the quality of the Ambient Occlusion map. A higher quality is slower to compute.

Available values:

  • Low (3 pass)
  • Medium (default, 5 pass)
  • High (10 pass)
  • Very High (16 pass)
Precision BiasPrecision of the ambient occlusion. A lower value will give a higher precision, but can produce bigger artefacts.
Distance FadeSpread of the ambient occlusion.

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