Quote: "Baking textures (Especially an Ambient Occlusion pass) Is probably one of the least used things in most DBPro games. Its a shame really, as it can really enhance a scene."
Agreed. I really should do a more in depth tutorial on this from different engine standpoints. Might have to wait 7 more weeks though, this semester has me uber busy.
Quote: "'lightmap' is a general term describing the medium at which baked lighting is applied: lighting thats baked to an image, or group of images, which are then multiplied overtop of existing geometry to create shadows. Baking them, as oppose to dynamic (real-time) or vertex lighting generally results in soft, more accurate shadows at the cost of texture memory.
'ao maps' and 'shadowmaps' are more specific types of lightmaps pertaining to the method at which their shadows are created. An AO map is a lightmap who's baked information can come from a highpoly (or sometimes low poly) to generate non-directional shadows. A 'shadowmap' is a lightmap that was created / baked by casting shadows from specific light sources, and generally results in soft(er) lighting than other alternatives (real-time/dynamic/vertex) depending on the proximity of the objecting casting shadows to the source of light. Generally both types have lots of options (number of light bounces, buffer, ray distances, etc)."
So, in short:
Lightmap = generic term
Shadowmap = uses specific lighting, like a lamp, to generate shadows.
Ambient occlusion map = can be used with a AO map to enhance the shadow, but by itself gives non-directional shadows.
@Tatts, yes, you can fake real time light with mapping... but why do that if you have real time lighting? AO Maps are suppose to be non directional, and that means they can work with real time lighting very nicely.
Hope that clears things up!
