do i need to bake my AO now on my diffuse?

Hi the old traditional method of baking involved baking your AO and overlaying it over your diffuse in photoshop.
Since the is an AO slot in the material editor I was wondering if that sort of workflow is needed anymore.

With PBR, you don’t want any shadow information on the diffuse/albedo.

Using the ambient occlusion slot in the material editor is the way to go. Just bake your AO as normal, but keep it as a separate texture (or store it in an alpha channel)

I don’t know the specifics, but it should allow the engine to occlude light in those areas without permanently baking the AO to the diffuse/albedo.

I tested the new “pin” of AO material input, and works nice. I just bake the AO texture using XNORMAL, and that´s it! Plug to the AO pin in material editor, and relax :slight_smile: