The baking of an ambient occlusion

Now that we have the normal map set, we will improve our alien with another map called an ambient occlusion.

Understanding the ambient occlusion map

An ambient occlusion is a black and white texture that represents the contact shadows of a mesh. The contact shadows are the shadows produced by the small proximity of objects. In order to have a nice ambient occlusion, we need to increase a sampling parameter that corresponds to the "noisiness" of the shadows. The more samples you have, the smoother the shadows will be. This map will then be multiplied on top of our diffuse material color.

Note

Multiplying colors

In computer graphics, black is represented by a value of 0 and white by a value of 1. So, when we multiply a color with black, its result is 0, and when we multiply a color with white, its result is the color. For instance, we will take two colors, J and K, a pure blue that is represented by R(J): 0, G(J): 0, and B(J):1 (RGB means Red Green Blue), and...