Baking an AO Map that takes a normal map into account?

[Fafhrd]

I can't figure this out. The Valve DOTA2 Texture guide (this is a TF2/general Blender question, bear with me, here) starts out with them saying to bake an AO Map to capture part of the sculptural detail of the normal maps, and the example image they show is apparently an AO Map showing shadowing generated by a normal map (or they have a billion poly bear model that they're baking their normal/ao/light maps out of. Which I guess is possible.)

So I'm trying to create a badge that has some raised text on it (see, TF2), and that'll blow through the poly limit if I try to model the text directly. I can create a normal map for it easily enough in GIMP, but I want some of the detail from the normal map to be reflected in the AO map, because it seems like it should be.

So I apply the normal map and it shows up properly, and then I bake AO, and the AO bakes out flat. I've tried setting the material to effect geometry and ambient, I've tried setting AO to raytrace instead of approximate, no matter what I do, the normal map gets ignored in the AO bake.

Am I missing something? Am I going to have to make a super-high poly version of the badge and bake normals and AO out of it, instead?

[HellJumper]

Originally posted by Fafhrd:

or they have a billion poly bear model that they're baking their normal/ao/light maps out of. Which I guess is possible.

That's actually exactly what they did :V They are making high poly sculpts that are tens of thousands of polys to get those maps (light maps, normal maps, ao bakes, etc).

In TF2, you'll never need to sculpt unless it's for a hair-ish item. Honestly, I don't see the point in using a normal map at all with a badge. It's so small that the normal map would be immaterial.

[Fafhrd]

The badge is more for an SFM thing I'm working on. I figure using the TF2 importer to compile the .mdl for me would be easier and more likely to work correctly with SFM than trying to compile it manually. I guess making a hi-poly version of the badge and then baking out the AO and Normal map via Selected to Active is the only way to go to get the results I want.