uexNormalToAO converts tangent-space normal maps into baked grayscale visibility maps directly inside the Unreal Engine 5 editor, with no runtime cost.

Based on Activision's research "Material Advances in Call of Duty: WWII", the plugin reconstructs a height field from your normal map and runs an orthographic GTAO-style visibility bake over it — giving you a physically grounded AO map derived purely from surface detail, without needing to set up a scene or capture a render.

Demo:
Video 1
Video 2 - Batch Convert

Video 3 - GPU Generation

Video 4 - Texture Packing

──────────────────────────────────────── HOW IT WORKS ────────────────────────────────────────

1. Height Reconstruction — Normal map slopes are extracted and solved into a height field using coarse-to-fine Jacobi relaxation, matching the structure described in Activision's research.

2. Visibility Bake — The height field is treated as an orthographic depth surface. For each pixel, horizon angles are searched across multiple directions and evaluated against a GTAO inner integral, producing a clean grayscale visibility map.

──────────────────────────────────────── KEY FEATURES ────────────────────────────────────────

• Offline CPU bake — no scene setup, no render, no runtime overhead

• Coarse-to-fine height reconstruction from normal-derived slope fields

• Orthographic GTAO-style horizon visibility bake

• Optional albedo interreflection compensation for artist-friendly AO output

• UV atlas support with edge guard to prevent dark dots around UV island borders - Seamless tileable texture support via border wrapping

• Green channel flip for DirectX / OpenGL normal map convention switching

• Optional height map export for inspection and debugging

──────────────────────────────────────── OUTPUT ────────────────────────────────────────

• 1.0 = fully visible / unoccluded

• 0.0 = fully occluded

The visibility map can be used directly as an AO input in your UE5 materials.

──────────────────────────────────────── NOTES ────────────────────────────────────────

• This plugin bakes the texture-side visibility result. It does not modify UE5 lighting shaders for CoD-style micro-shadowing or specular cone occlusion.

• Built and tested on Unreal Engine 5.7.4.

• Bulk convert avaliable.