How to bake ambient occlusion in Blender

Ambient occlusion is the soft darkness in folds and under edges. Baked into a texture it gives clothing depth even in flat light.

What you need

• Blender with Cycles
• An unwrapped garment (and its high-poly version if you have one)

Steps

1. Prepare an image. Add an Image Texture node with a new image to the garment's material and keep it selected.
2. Choose the bake type. In Render properties > Bake set Bake Type to Ambient Occlusion. Tick Selected to Active if you bake from a high-poly version.
3. Raise the samples. AO is noisy at low sample counts. Raise the render samples until the result is smooth.
4. Bake and save. Press Bake and save the image.
5. Use it. For classic textures, multiply the AO over the colour map in your image editor. For PBR, the AO goes into the red channel of the combined occlusion-roughness-metallic texture.

Tips

• Hide the body while baking unless you want its shadow on the inside of the garment.
• A little AO goes a long way; too much makes fabric look dirty.
• Bake with the garment in its rest pose.

Next

• How to make PBR materials for Second Life
• How to texture clothing in Substance Painter for Second Life

Words you do not know? See the glossary. All guides: how-to guides.

This page is a written overview. In the SL Designers video courses you watch clothing being made from start to finish, and our Blender addons take over much of the technical work.