I have created a tool for modders of the game IL2.
One of the things I want to add is baking of AO maps.
I tried one technique that basically put's a camera at a vertex looking along the normal, renders the aircraft, and counts the number of pixels drawn to work out how occluded a vert is, but it produced awful results.
Looking at the meshes I was using as test subjects, lot's of the normals are wrong. I've tried a couple of techniques to correct them, but they are not very successful and I don't think just doing vertex based AO will produce the quality I want.
So I am trying to come up with a technique that doesn't use normals.
Has anyone come across a technique for generating AO maps that doesn't require the use of normals?