New Prefab Builder, Do I use AO shadows or not?

[skorreynimble]

My big question, AO or not AO. I have read so much here in the forums, and some had even said, leave out the shadows.

I created my first prefab, focusing on small houses for the 512 size parcels. I want to sell them for low cost, as being new, I was looking for this. Creating the house in CAD mesh a getting it into world is not that big of an issue, as I have done CAD for a while. Blender? I bring in my models and tweak and select faces in there.  So I texture in world, using some PBR and some standard textures, that look to me, pretty good. I use SL or Firestorm AO, and high graphics settings to see shadows. Why I do not think I should do the AO, is I have bought many houses, and I always like to change the textures inside and out. There is so much complexity to doing this AO I see, that before I dive into that, I would like to hear what you all think about these baked AO shadows. Also, not sure if many people are like me, buy a prefab and change all the textures.

Everything in the photo I made in CAD, except the flat woodwork on the floor, those are just primes. There is some shadows, by the viewer.

What do all you think, I am thinking no AO.

 

[MoiraKathleen]

I'm not a builder - just a resident that buys things others make and put up for sale, so I'm not completely sure what AO means in terms of building and texturing.  However, if what you are asking is whether or not your product should come with baked in shadows that will always be visible, and have no connection to where the sun or other lights actually are, my personal opinion would be to not have those types of shadows built into the product.  I would rather have shadows that are created by the rendering system based on the actual lighting, and that I can also turn off or on depending on how I set my graphics preferences.  

[Codex Alpha]

13 hours ago, skorreynimble said:

My big question, AO or not AO. I have read so much here in the forums, and some had even said, leave out the shadows.

I created my first prefab, focusing on small houses for the 512 size parcels. I want to sell them for low cost, as being new, I was looking for this. Creating the house in CAD mesh a getting it into world is not that big of an issue, as I have done CAD for a while. Blender? I bring in my models and tweak and select faces in there.  So I texture in world, using some PBR and some standard textures, that look to me, pretty good. I use SL or Firestorm AO, and high graphics settings to see shadows. Why I do not think I should do the AO, is I have bought many houses, and I always like to change the textures inside and out. There is so much complexity to doing this AO I see, that before I dive into that, I would like to hear what you all think about these baked AO shadows. Also, not sure if many people are like me, buy a prefab and change all the textures.

Everything in the photo I made in CAD, except the flat woodwork on the floor, those are just primes. There is some shadows, by the viewer.

What do all you think, I am thinking no AO.

Occlusion [R] / Roughness [G] / Metalness [B]

This texture is composed of 3 unrelated grayscale images stored in 3 different color channels of an RGB texture.
[R]: (Ambient) Occlusion is lighting data, removing the need to bake down shadows on to the Base Color map. Note that white (<1,1,1>) means no occlusion is applied, and black (<0,0,0>) applies full occlusion.
[G]: Roughness data ranges from 0 to 1.0, but the actual range of physical surfaces ranges from approximately 0.05 to 0.985. No surface is perfectly smooth or completely rough. The rougher a surface is the less mirror-like it behaves.
[B]: Metalness values are mostly black or white. Either the material is a conductive metal like copper, or it’s a non-metal like fabric. 0.0 is Non-Metallic, 1.0 is Metallic. There are almost no materials with gray metalness values.

PBR Material Composition - Second Life Wiki