AO Baker

The AO Baker computes ambient occlusion on the GPU in seconds and writes the result to a texture or to a vertex color channel. It is faster than Unity’s built-in CPU baker for hero meshes and supports both per-texel mode (for prop textures) and per-vertex mode (for low-poly meshes that feed AO through vertex colors).

When to use it

Hero props that need crisp AO without the wait of a CPU bake.
Low-poly mobile meshes where per-vertex AO is the cheapest route.
Procedural pipelines that emit fresh meshes — bake on import.

Flat-lit prop — corners and crevices share the same value as flat surfaces.

Corners darken, contact pockets read; same material, same lighting.

No AO

AO baked

A baked AO map adds contact darkening you cannot get from screen-space cavity alone.

Opening the tool

Window → Genesis → AO Baker. The window opens with a mesh slot, a settings panel, and a live preview.

Screenshot

The AO Baker editor window showing the mesh source slot, the Mode/Resolution/Samples/Max Distance settings panel, and a live preview of a baked AO map on the selected mesh.

tools/ao-baker/ao-baker-window.png

Workflow

Set the source mesh — drop a mesh into the source slot, or select a GameObject in the scene and click Use Selection.
Pick a mode — Per-texel writes a Texture2D; Per-vertex writes to the mesh’s vertex color alpha channel.
Configure sampling — resolution, sample count, max distance, and falloff curve. Higher sample counts are cleaner and slower.
Bake — a GPU progress bar runs while the compute shader integrates rays. Output is saved next to the mesh and auto-assigned to the selected Genesis material’s _OcclusionMap slot if one is targeted.
(Optional) Adjust the Bias and Dilate sliders post-bake; the baker recomputes without re-tracing for instant feedback.

Settings

Inspector label	Shader property	Type	Default	Description
Mode	Mode	Enum	Per-texel	Per-texel writes a Texture2D; Per-vertex writes to vertex color alpha.
Resolution	Resolution	Int (pow2)	1024	Output map size. Power of two.
Samples	Samples	Int	128	Rays per texel. 256 reads as cinematic.
Max Distance	MaxDistance	Float	1.0	Ray length in world units.
Falloff	Falloff	AnimationCurve	Linear	Distance attenuation curve.
Bias	Bias	Float	0.001	Self-intersection bias along the normal.
Dilate	Dilate	Int	4	UV island padding to prevent seam bleed.

Tips & gotchas

For very low-poly meshes, prefer Per-vertex and pipe AO into the Vertex Colors feature on the Genesis material.
The baker uses UV1 by default — if your second UV channel is your lightmap UV, switch to UV0 in advanced settings.
AO bakes in mesh-local space. Animated rigs should bake on the bind-pose mesh, not on a posed snapshot.

AO Baker is a one-shot tool. For runtime crevice darkening across the whole scene, install the Cavity module instead.