Vertex Oven bakes ambient occlusion directly to vertex colors (and, optionally, vertex groups.)
Vertex Oven works with Blender 2.80 and up.
The addon is available on Blender Market for $20. Once downloaded, here's how to install the addon:
To download from GitHub for free, download the file vertex-oven-<version>.zip
from the Releases page.
If you find that Vertex Oven improves your workflow, please consider purchasing it as well.
Thank you for considering Vertex Oven!
With a mesh object active, open the Object menu in the 3D view, select Vertex Oven, and select Bake Vertex Ambient Occlusion. When you're happy with the settings, click OK. Baking will take anywhere from a few seconds to multiple minutes; keep an eye on the status on the left side of Blender's statusbar.
To use the vertex colors in a shader, add an Attribute node and type in the name of the vertex color layer (Ambient Occlusion by default.)
Use the Fac output as the ambient occlusion value; by default, this ranges from 0.0
(fully occluded) to 1.0
(no occlusion.)
For a quick preview of vertex colors, you can also enter Vertex Paint mode (Ctrl-Tab and select the top option.)
First release.
If you have any questions about this addon, email me at forestcgk@gmail.com.
GPL v3 license; see LICENSE
file.