Ambient Occlusion

I am trying to get ambient occlusion to work with Unity 5.

I have been able to create AO with a Unity cube like every tutorial online shows. I have not had much success when bringing in objects from other programs. (.obj and .fbx) Especially with interiors. I am wondering what type of lighting is needed in an enclosed space. Perhaps a setting to include a certain ambient or lighting type that is not in the room. It just never works.

 

Are your models set to "static"?

 

any progress, I'm getting getting the same problem

 

Unity 5 has a different model of ambient occlusion than Unity 4.
In Unity 4 we had a physical incorrect model that did shadow areas that are hit by direct light.
In Unity 5 if a direct light is hitting a potential AO place it is not shown.
Its more realistic but it is less artist friendly.
Unity is working a solution to have the old behavior as an option for the new enlighten light-map backing.
@djm478 Did you check the create light-map uv setting in the model importer settings?
Without that unity cant light-back / AO Bake the object.

 

i have the same problem, AO have almost no effect.
I can see a very small difference between AO on and AO off, but almost nothing.

a black to white gradient would bee cool, like in unity4...

 

With "old behaviour" do you mean only the ao or is it possible that we get an option for beast lightmapping, too?

 

I mean the AO, unity will not bring the beast light-mapper back.

 

Any news on bringing the "old" ambient light and AO from Unity 4 into Unity 5??

 

I just asked Eric this personally with this message :

"Hello there, I have tried to use the new Lightmapper and its incredibly slow, full of bugs but most importantly it is not ready. I was able to make beast render very quickly with nice results.

But now no matter what settings I put into the new GI even if my light and rendering system are set to baked the end result is poor and takes way too long.

I want to know if their are any plans on bringing back beast to Unity 5, their was nothing wrong with it, it did its job perfectly and the new lighting system looks good for everything but AO/lightmapping and the lighting overview video, even the docs do not cover baking lightmaps for clean AO and things like that. In fact I couldn't find any good tutorials on the matter.

What do I do?

I want to achieve the amazing depth with scenes like this but the problem with Physically Based Rendering is you lose the ability to create styalized lighting..."

He just said to post it in the forums, this place seems to be the best place for it.

If you ask me either bring back beast or bring back the way it baked its AO/Shadows etc.

 

Since beast is not ready for the PBR workflow it will not come back as a official sollution.
A Unity developer posted in the form that they are talking to Geomerics (the developer of Enlighten Light Backing system) to bring a way to to do the stylised AO that beast did.

 

Beast is officially removed with no plans for it to return, so if you're getting issues it's always a good idea to file a bug report with any additional information ie comparison shots.

 

Our problem is we had a good system to bake lighting specifically Color and AO which beast did really well.

It was removed without a fallback as the new system is not ready or at the caliber beast is.

To achieve realism I have looked for a good share of alternatives.
The closest thing I have found which does a good job is a plugin called Vertex Dirt but its vertex dependent which means your definitely not going to bake crystal clear AO unless you have a high poly count.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/21015

It is really close though even for low polycount.

Anyone have any ideas, HippoCoder I am sure you have seen almost every plugin under the sun, know any I could use here until Unity 5 brings a beast alternative?

P.S. I should also mention that plugin works with the standard shader if you enable vertex colors on it or follow the asset store forum link to grab that shader directly. Its really fast.

 

I recommend just biting the bullet with realtime AO - try sonic ether's new SSAO or SSAO pro. They're not all that slow. Regarding baking lighting, since the AO is baked you might want to look at what settings you use, and perhaps modifying the standard shader so AO isn't affected by light.

 

Thanks, maybe your right, perhaps for now SSAO might need a turn from me, the Sonic one really did surprise me when it came out and it did look pretty good with a lot of tweak-able settings.

I didn't know how good beast was until it was gone hah.

 

It's good to see it's coming but that update is more than 3 months away and Enlightens AO is very bad looking because it tries to simulate a non-physical look with a physically based system so unless it's a complete change to what it currently does it won't be of much help.

Hopefully though it will help some people.