Awesome

This little public domain tool does the following:

• Generates reasonable UV's for any topologically "clean" mesh.
• Creates a texture representing ambient occlusion.

The first bullet uses Thekla's parameterization code; the second bullet uses Intel's embree library for raytracing.

Similar Tools

Texture coordinates can be generated using Microsoft's open source UVAtlas tool, which is a somewhat Windows-oriented project.

libigl can do mesh parameterization and ambient occlusion baking. It is protected by the Mozilla Public License.

IBLBaker does something completely different, but also looks interesting.

xatlas

lightmapper

Usage

$ aobaker --help

  Usage: aobaker [options] input_mesh.obj

  Options:
    --outmesh   OBJ file to produce (result.obj)
    --atlas     PNG file to produce (result.png)
    --sizehint  Controls resolution of atlas (32)
    --nsamples  Quality of ambient occlusion (128)
    --gbuffer   Generate diagnostic images
    --ids       Add a chart id to the alpha channel
    --multiply  Scales the AO values by a constant (1.0)
    --version   Output version
    --help      Output help

Building in OS X

Homebrew is the easiest way to install the dependencies:

$ cp ~/git/aobaker/embree.rb /usr/local/Library/Formula
$ brew install embree tbb cmake

This is optional, but you might want to use a compiler that supports OpenMP, which is a bit tricky if you've already got clang installed. Here's how I did it:

brew uninstall gcc
brew install gcc --without-multilib
export CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc-5
export CXX=/usr/local/bin/g++-5

Now you're ready to build! Here's how to invoke CMake so that it puts all the messy stuff into a folder called build:

$ cmake . -Bbuild      # Generate Makefile
$ cmake --build build  # Build the Makefile