Baking ambient occlusion only in unity 5

It seems that with Unity 5 you cannot bake just AO, please bring back this from the earlier versions.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/baking-only-the-ambient-occlusion.297784/

Anyone have any suggestions how to achieve AO only bake(or similar results) through the new lighting system?

 

I got OK results by settings the ambient colour in the lighting settings to white and the intensity to max with AO on and realtime GI off and no other lights in the scene. Not as good as Beast, but not bad. Thought, there still seems to be a bug in the texture compression for lightmaps that produces garbage artifacts if you use the compress option. Booh for mobile!

 

Yep, also noticed. You need to bake the Ambient GI to get Ambient occlusion. AO is an effect thats only dependent on geometry, so it should be perfectly fine to combine a baked AO with a dynamic skylight. The assets looks more rooted in the world, and you see the shape much better when it has some AO and it would be nice to combine this with a dynamic skydome. So, please unity, fix this.

 

Currently the AO intensity is way too low. Any chance you could unlock that slider to go past the value "1"?

 

AO output is a lot softer with Enlighten - in practice this is more realistic (many artists are way too heavy handed with AO).

I get your frustration though - while Beast was flawed in many respects, it was actually quite good for stylistic game art as you could make it bend to your will. Not so easy with Enlighten. I wonder if some advanced settings are being hidden for the sake of simplicity (i.e. AO cone).

 

I've been experimenting with the new lightmapping and trying to transfer my lighting setups from the 4.6 version. I found the key to this was using the Lightmap Parameters where you can tweak the details, including AO baking.

It can be found from General GI tab, under Default Parameters. Create a new one and experiment.

It's shown on the Inspector on the right:


I don't know how much control you get out of those regarding AO, but otherwise the precomputed Realtime GI settings were a life saver for me.

 

Awesome, thanks!

 

I am getting an issue where I can't get the AO to be seen on the object such as a Cube but it does appear on the floor....I am using the standard shader....is that supposed to happen?

 

Where is this setting to crank up the AO? I am in 5.1.2f1 and I don't see it.