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[John514]

Sketchup is a very easy and fast way of modelling but it lacks the advanced features of Blender of 3DS Max.
One in particular is the ability to bake ambient occlusion, that makes models look so much better and realistic. Is there a way to use Real-Time ambient occlusion with Outerra or even better use Outerra`s ambient occlusion to re-draw the textures inside the engine, baking the ambient occlusion for future use of the object.

In detail, the model is imported into Outerra, rendered in real time, baked and saved again for normal use.
Outerra will only have to calculate the Ambient Occlusion (Or even the direct illumination - reflections) ONE TIME, that is when the model is first imported. Then, after baking the AO and DI and applying the reflection map (I dont know if the reflections will be allways real-time in Outerra) the model is saved and used normaly. Also the reflection maps could be generated when the object is placed, so that they reflect the objects surroundings.

[angrypig]

There is no plan to add ambient occlusion (AO) baker into engine there are a lot of tools that can do that for you. But we plan to add real-time AO into engine. We already made a few tests but it needs a lot of optimization to be usable.

[John514]

Nice! Do you know of any tools that can bake AO in Sketchup?

[angrypig]

Not directly in Sketchup but you can import it into Blender, there are a lot of tutorials for Blender how to do that.

[ZeosPantera]

There is no plan to add ambient occlusion (AO) baker into engine there are a lot of tools that can do that for you. But we plan to add real-time AO into engine. We already made a few tests but it needs a lot of optimization to be usable.

So artistic!

[John514]

Perhaps you could try using harder AO just to speed up the rendering. Soft AO is really stressing for the system and its not worth it compared to hard (basic) AO.

[Jagerbomber]

Wallpaper!

Scratch that.... Toilet paper!

I think (/hope) I'm glad that it's getting real-time AO, because baked on AO just looks baaad to me.  At least with current hardware capabilities.  Emphasizes jaggie shadows and my stupid eyes always lock on to moving jaggies.  Partially why I haven't been much of a fan of the newest AA methods I've tried.

[John514]

I think its the other way around.
Baked AO is more detailed that real-time, isn`t it?

[Jagerbomber]

I'm honestly not sure, but I don't think so.  Doesn't baked-on AO have more "guessing" to do when creating shadows?

[John514]

But uses all of the prossessing power, once.
Not part of it, constantly. But thats just me.

[angrypig]

You forgot the memory footprint...

[John514]

It can be one with the main texture, then again when you bake detail, you increase the texture memory size...
Since Outerra is streaming most of its data, and loading the rest from the hard drive, maybe real-time is better.
Does AO have an LOD kind of system (fade to lower detail as you move away?)

[John514]

I just remembered! What kind of real time AO is used in Just Cause 2?
The game is procedural, uses AO and has perhaps the best performance v/s graphics I have ever seen in a game! On low settings it looks fantastic and performs as good as well.

[John514]

OK I run Just Cause 2...is SSAO

Compared to other ambient occlusion solutions, SSAO has the following advantages:
Independent from scene complexity.
No data pre-processing needed, no loading time and no memory allocations in system memory.
Works with dynamic scenes.
Works in the same consistent way for every pixel on the screen.
No CPU usage – it can be executed completely on the GPU.
May be easily integrated into any modern graphics pipeline.
Of course it has its disadvantages as well:
Rather local and in many cases view-dependent, as it is dependent on adjacent texel depths which may be generated by any geometry whatsoever.
Hard to correctly smooth/blur out the noise without interfering with depth discontinuities, such as object edges (the occlusion should not "bleed" onto objects).

(wikipedia)