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Faogen
Fast Ambient Occlusion Generator. Use your video card GPU to compute ambient occlusion really fast.
Support both texture and per-vertex calculation.
Input scene can loaded from Wavefront OBJ or LightWave 3D object (*.LWO) files (future versions will allow to use more file formats).
Faogen itself uses hardware shadow mapping, floating-point render targets and OpenGL Shading Language to compute ambient occlusion data. This process is much faster than any CPU-based approach.
C++ library for integrating AO generation into your applications also available: Faogenlib.
With version 3 Faogen is moved to its own website: www.faogen.com
Order Single User License Now!
Automation
- 3dsmax script for vertex AO baking: MxT_faogenAOrender.zip. Thanks to Sebastien Larrue.
- MEL script for automating Faogen use from Maya available: soeBakeAmbientOcclussion.mel. Thanks to Alex Carbonero.
- Another MEL script can be found here: www.digitalweaponx.net/files/FaoGenRender1.5.rar. Thanks to Lamont Gilkey.
- LScript for Lightwave: www.digitalweaponx.net/files/FaoGenLWEd.rar. Thanks to Lamont Gilkey.
information
Version: 1.7
File size: 1.05 MB
Single User License Price: $69.95
Site License Price: $399.95
system requirements
- .NET Framework 2.0
- ATI Radeon 9500 (and higher) or NVIDIA GeForce FX (and higher)
- Windows 2000 or Windows XP operating system
Make sure to use latest video card drivers.
screenshots
getting started
See this tutorial to learn basics of Faogen.
Note: tutorial was made with version 1.0.
View Online manual.
version history
New in 2.0 preview version:
This version provide updated ambient aperture and bent normals shaders with ability to customize them. Other features include improved precision on large scale models, adjustable background for AO texture images, lighting animation control and few bugfixes.
New in 1.9 preview version:
Preview of new AO calculation feature: bent normals. It can be used in many dynamic lighting models from regular fixed-function lighting with bent normals to more advanced like ambient aperture lighting.
New in 1.7 version:
- Features from 2.0 beta: alpha-test transparency, OBJE geometry format, different image formats
- Fixed bug with geometry merging
- Fixed problem with importing OBJ, saved by 3dsmax
- Fixed few bugs causing crashes on some systems
New in 1.6 version:
- Hemisphere mode to simulate lighting from sky
- Few interface improvements and bugfixes
New in 1.5 version:
- Faogen remembers object options from previous scene session
- Object options setup can be saved as preset and applied later
- Merge command now allows selecting multiple files at once
New in 1.4 version:
- FaogenBatch - command-line utility for automating ambient occlusion baking
- Source code for FaogenBatch C# application, so you can modify it for your needs
- Site License allows use of Faogen on any number of computers inside one organisation
New in 1.3 version:
- Fixed bug with incorrect interpretation of smooth-groups in loaded scene
- Export scene with materials, which contain ambient occlusion data - for both OBJ and LWO exporters
- Added possibility to enable filtering for ambient occlusion textures
New in 1.2 version:
- LWO IO plugin
- Increases maximum size of generated texture on NVIDIA cards
New in 1.1 version:
- Improved quality of generated AO maps
- Object selection by picking them with mouse in viewport
- Increased speed of loading high polygonal objects
- Better UI allows to re-generate AO only for selected objects
