If you’re tired of waiting for ambient occlusion passes to render, then maybe you should look at a tool from ‘Rusted Dreams’ called ‘Faogen’. It’s a hardware accelerated rendering system designed solely for ambient occlusion map generation.
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:
In the current version you have to be able to convert your scene/model into OBJ or LWO (Lightwave) files, but they hope to expand this to other formats in future versions. They have a free demo available for download, after which it’s only $70 per license, and $400 for a site-license.
