Ambient Occlusion

I have forgotten to mention about something that Dean showed me to try out on my models and this was to generate an ambient occlusion. An ambient occlusion is baked into the diffuse map and gives the diffuse map alot more depth i have found this to be very effective on my models. At first Dean showed me how to generate an occlusion map in 3DS Max, however after learning about this type of technique X-Normal also can generate them. Having tried out both of them i decided to use X-Normal as this seemed to give me better results. After X-Normal generates the occlusion maps it is copied and pasted into the Photoshop file and the layer is either changed to Overlay or Multiply i found that certain diffuse maps i made got better results. Here are those Ambient Occlusion maps on their own;

Head and Body Ambient Occlusions

Assault Rifle Ambient Occlusion

Mini Gun Ambient Occlusion

Hoverbike Ambient Occlusion

Here is an example of my Hoverbike texture with a Ambient Occlusion present and one without it, as you can see there is a massive difference between the two of them.