Baking Global AO in EEVEE
I know there is the Irradiance Cache, that can also be used for games, BUT, while being in EEVEE would be great to bake AO only to the textures, cause after that there is no more calculations. Irradiance cache needs to be rebaked every time the scene changes.
So it would be like this: You switch on AO Baking in EEVEE and it would render to a texture that is OVERLAYED as a layer node over the existing shaders while duplicating UVs of all (or only bake-selected) objects. Going trough Cycles would triple the time needed.
4 Comments
EEVEE doesn't really handle AO in the way you'd require (it's a post effect). This may be the territory of an add-on that will switch to Cycles, render a true AO, save the texture, switch back to EEVEE, assign to texture, etc.
A good scripter should be able to do that in a few hours.
* @Wahooney * Baking AO in Blender 2.79 internal gives cleaner, smoother transition, and faster AO. That is the functionality that it would be nice to have back.
Using Cycles is too time consuming compared to a realtime option. In many cases, realtime solutions are just fine, so it would be a real time saver to have them.
I build an addon to auto bake ao and lightmaps to use in glb, but you can use it for what ever you want. gumroad.com/l/cimFj
Problem still is, you can not define the intensity of the ao map