Does anyone have any experience dumping ambient occlusion data to a texture for use like a lightmap? I use instances of the same piece of static geometry in a very large scene that I'm preprocessing the lighting for. Therefore, baking in Max, baking to the diffuse texture, or any modification to the original piece of geometry is out of the question. Thanks for any help.

The only way I found was to use a second set of uvw coordinates, and bake the ao map using those; usually the whole scene into one BIG texture.

The trouble is, as the 3ds format doesn't allow more than 1 set of uvw coordinates to be exported, you will have to either write your own exporter script, or export the second set of uvw's separately, and ten recombine them someway upon loading the scene.

Hope that helps.

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The only way I found was to use a second set of uvw coordinates, and bake the ao map using those; usually the whole scene into one BIG texture.

Exactly. That's what I'm after and I'm unsure about the best method to do this. How do I create the second set of UV coords? I would like to atlas all the lightmaps at the end of the day as well.

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The trouble is, as the 3ds format doesn't allow more than 1 set of uvw coordinates to be exported, you will have to either write your own exporter script, or export the second set of uvw's separately, and ten recombine them someway upon loading the scene.

I am saving the current obscurance value per-vertex out into an XML and when I load the model, I convert it into an internal format and create another vertex stream. UV coords would be just as easy to store in the XML. This is ideal since the original geometry has to remain untouched.