VertexDirt is a Unity plugin for baking ambient occlusion to vertex colors. It does not use lightmaps, so unwrapped uv coordinates are unnecessary. Good for mobile game development.
For more detail this asset from the Unity Asset Store: Click Here
This is a paid asset, but now you can download the “VertexDirt – Vertex Ambient Occlusion” for FREE. Please keep in mind that this package is provided only for learning purposes or to test before buying the product, NOT FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES.
VertexDirt – Vertex Ambient Occlusion v1.8
“If possible, please buy the package to support the developer”
Please remove previous version before upgrade.
This package contains:
– Ambient occlusion baking editor tool
– Mesh saver (with vertex colors) editor tool
– shaders with vertex color support
– sample scenes
VertexDirt is a Unity plugin for baking ambient occlusion to vertex colors. It not uses lightmaps, no need of unwrapped uv coordinates. Good for mobile game development. VertexDirt is an offline technique, which means it is not updating the results realtime, you have to ‘bake’ it instead in the Unity Editor. The way of baking is similar to the Unity Lihtmapping baking.
What is ambient occlusion? A
mbient occlusion is a general term referring to a method to approximate how much indirect lighting a part of a surface recieves. Ambient Occlusion is a non realistic technique, but adds realism to your scenes. This is a commonly used technique in games. The idea behind ambient occlusion is that in nature, bouncing light reaches occluded areas (e.g. the ground under a car) less often compared to open areas, which lead to dark shadows under the car even in overcast day.
What are vertex colors?
Vertex colors are part of the data structure of a mesh, just like the vertex positions or the vertex normals. This array of colors are contains only white colors by default. It can be used for different purposes. VertexDirt uses vertex colors to store the baked AO. Storing and using colors this way is fast and have a small memory and storage footprint.
Shader requirements
In Unity, vertex colors are only visible if you using shaders which supports them. Although the Default and Standard shaders doesn’t supports vertex colors, it is really simple to add this feature to them. You can find vertex color shader in the Unity Forums ans Asset Store too. VertexDirt package also bundled with some sample shaders to start with.
