Baked Ambient Occlusion Or Real Time Ambient Occlusion?

[liquify]

Hi Everyone,

I have more than 3000 objects and more than five millions polygons in a scene. For performance, is it better to bake the ambient occlusion of each object in a 3D animation software (e.g. 3ds Max, Maya), or is it better to use real time ambient occlusion in Unity (e.g. Unity SSAO, SSAO Pro) ?

[Steven]

As far as I know, SSAO is basically rendering the screen off, running some checks on it finding edges and putting the results back up on screen once it is done, so there is a constant but consistent performance cost to using it.

If you bake AO into your diffuse texture there wouldn’t be any performance difference, but you would have the AO baked into your textures. Depends on your art if that is ok or not.

If you used AO as an extra texture in a shader set up I am sure there would be a performance cost, but also the memory cost of the extra maps.

Take it with a pinch of salt

[liquify]

@Steven

As far as I know, SSAO is basically rendering the screen off, running some checks on it finding edges and putting the results back up on screen once it is done, so there is a constant but consistent performance cost to using it.

If you bake AO into your diffuse texture there wouldn’t be any performance difference, but you would have the AO baked into your textures. Depends on your art if that is ok or not.

If you used AO as an extra texture in a shader set up I am sure there would be a performance cost, but also the memory cost of the extra maps.

Take it with a pinch of salt

So I think I have to bake the AO to the diffuse textures for a very large scene with thousands of objects and millions of polygons. Do you have any experience with a very large scene in Unity? Do you prefer to bake the lighting and shadows in a 3D animation software or in Unity?