This recipe will show you how to extract an ambient occlusion map from your sculpted model. By adding an ambient occlusion pass to your textures, you will notice a big improvement on how real your object will feel. The ambient occlusion map simulates the way light bounces off the surface of a real world object and leaves more shadows in the crevices and corners of the object. This is a standard addition to textures and renders within the movie, television, 3D visualization, and game industries.
For this recipe, you will need a model with multiple subdivision levels so that you can bake information from the high resolution level down to the lower resolution level. If you have a sculpt that you have created in Mudbox and you'd like to follow along with, then go ahead and load it up now. If you do not have a sculpt of your own or you would just like to follow the recipe more closely then you can open up Victorian Lioness Not UVed.mud
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You will...