Ambient Occlusion Map Generator

An ambient occlusion (AO) map is a grayscale texture that stores how much ambient light reaches each part of a surface. Cracks, seams and recesses are dark, exposed areas are white, and the renderer multiplies it into indirect lighting to add contact shadowing.

The image luminance is treated as a height field. For every pixel the generator traces 12 directions at three distances and measures how much surrounding surface sits higher than it, then converts that into occlusion. Radius controls how far it looks, intensity how strongly the result is applied.

Match it to the size of the detail you want shaded. Around 10–20 px picks up fabric weave and fine grain, 25–45 px suits brick mortar and tile grout, and above 60 px shades broad dents and large panel gaps. The default of 24 px is a good starting point for most tileable textures.

In Unreal it goes into the Ambient Occlusion input, in Unity into the Occlusion slot, and in Blender you multiply it over the base color or feed it into a Mix node before the Principled BSDF. glTF packs AO into the red channel of the ORM texture.

No. A baked AO map is computed from actual mesh geometry. This is an image-space estimate from a single photo, which is exactly what you want for tileable surface textures where no high-poly source mesh exists.