Post Description

Faogen stands for Fast Ambient Occlusion Generator. It's a small tool for baking ambient occlusion of 3D models into textures or per-vertex colors. First version was released in 2006, and after two years of active development it was eventually suspended. But now it returns as Faogen 3. Powered by modern 3D GPUs it bakes ambient occlusion even faster and with higher quality. Right now it's Windows-only, but Mac port is planned after final Faogen 3 release.

Supported formats
Faogen 3 loads and saves following 3D formats: Wavefront OBJ, Autodesk FBX, 3DStudio 3DS, Collada DAE and AutoCAD DXF. Baked AO textures can be saved as 8-bit PNG or TGA grayscale images. Future versions will include support for saving to HDR image formats. Also, AO texture can be copied to system clipboard and pasted directly into image-authoring program.

AO baking modes

AO can be baked into texture or into per-vertex color channel.

Overlapping UVs
Many 3d models contain symmetrical (or repeated) parts, which can share same UV coordinates to save texture space. Usually, baking of ambient occlusion (or any other surface parameters) into such textures produces unwanted artifacts when overlapped parts simultaneously write into same portion of texture.

Faogen 3 adds special support for baking texture AO for objects with overlapping parts by averaging their input into final image.

Home Page -
http://www.faogen.com/