I’m having problems setting up my lightmaps. I want to bake ambient occlusion into my lightmap, but it won’t show up. Nothing changes whether I activate it under “World Settings → Lightmass → Use Ambient Occlusion” or not. In the Ambient Occlusion Buffer Visualization view mode I can see it just fine, but it’s just not used by the lightmap.
Are there any other settings that I need to change to have visible AO? Something in my lights, or my meshes, or the blueprints using the meshes? Also strange: After building the lightmap, it throws an error which says that I have to build the lightmap.
I’m really new to this lighting stuff, so any help would be appreciated - I just want my corners to be darker.
There a couple of ways to go about using AO. There is some information here on these two links for setting up AO and what is needed. (Link Here) (Link Here)
This is just an assumption as I am currently not in front of the editor, but ambient occlusion typically only does just that: occlusion of the ambient term. This means that AO should not show up where there is only direct lighting from say a point or infinite light. It should however be visible in areas illuminated primarily by ambient sources, such as (presumably) a skylight or something similar, i.e. a nondirectional source.
I just switched from directional lights to point lights and now there is some AO, but not more or less whether I activate AO in the world settings or not. It’s workable, but only to a limit. I don’t assume there is a way to manually add the AO that is shown in the AO visualization to the lightmap (or the material)? I really like the look of overdriven AO in the corners in my scene but I just don’t get the lighting right without having the whole level way too dark. I’m trying a very abstract art style, so I’m not going for realism.
