Ambient Occlusion

Before baking

• Enter Paint mode and select the target texture.
• Make sure at least one visible cube or mesh face uses that texture.
• Keep all intended casting geometry visible and exportable.
• Finish any current Surface, Edge, lighting, gradient, or AO job first.
• For animated textures, use a whole-pixel frame height.

Bake the pass

1. 1

   Open AO

   Choose the Bake Ambient Occlusion action from Blockbench's Image menu.

   Image > Bake Ambient Occlusion

2. 2

   Choose a style

   Smooth keeps a continuous response. Pixel Art quantizes the same mask into deliberate levels.

3. 3

   Choose temperature

   Cool, Neutral, and Warm steer each source color toward a nearby shadow family instead of one universal tint.

4. 4

   Bake

   AO creates a separate editable layer above existing Form Gradient output.

Adjust the strength

• Lower the native layer opacity for a subtler result.
• Duplicate the AO layer when the demo specifically asks for a stronger pass.
• Edit Generated Pass rebuilds the same layer with new settings.
• Detach Generated Pass to Pixels keeps the bitmap and removes its recipe.

Important boundaries

• Geometry using another texture can still cast AO, but output goes only to faces using the active texture.
• Transparent cutout geometry still casts as solid triangles.
• Overlapping UV faces share one atlas result.
• Large scenes can take time, but the job yields and can be cancelled safely.