

Now that Blender can Render-Bake Meshes, one simple correction in the Ambient Occlusion algorithm would make possible to Render-Bake a displacement map between two arbitrary meshes.
Ambient Occlusion works by firing a hemisphere (cone) of shadow-rays around from a point on a mesh.
The hemisphere is oriented along the point's normal.
In the AO panel we can specify a "bias factor" wich is the angle (in radians) the sampling hemisphere will be made more narrow.
Currently the bias limit is small (0.5 radians = 28 degrees).
The idea is to augment the bias limit enough to align the sampling rays to the point's normal.
This way the baked ambient occlusion (obtained with "Use Distances" activated) becomes a displacement map.
It would be possible to bake two arbitrary meshes even if they overlap, by baking one displace-map, flipping the mesh normals and then baking a second displace-map. The two maps can then be combined in Photoshop-Gimp or Blender sequencer.
It would be great for baking sculpted meshes into animatable ones with shape keys, bones and such.
What do you think? It is doable?

