What causes double darkening from baked AO and SSAO overlap?

Baked AO is already folded into the lightmap and then SSAO darkens the same crevices again at runtime, so contact areas receive occlusion twice and read as crushed black.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Double-Darkened Corners from Baked AO Plus SSAO Overlap

Quick answer: Disable one AO source: either turn off SSAO where you bake AO into lightmaps, or skip baking AO and rely on SSAO, and tune the remaining one's intensity.

Ambient occlusion should darken contact areas once. If you both bake AO into the lightmap and run SSAO, crevices get darkened twice and look dirty. Picking a single AO source fixes it.

How to fix it

1. Decide on one AO source

Choose either baked AO (in the lightmapper's AO settings) or runtime SSAO/GTAO, not both, for the same surfaces. Stacking them is the root cause of crushed corners.

2. Disable baked AO if you keep SSAO

If SSAO/GTAO handles your contact shadows, turn off Ambient Occlusion in the lightmapper and rebake so the lightmap no longer pre-darkens crevices.

3. Or disable SSAO on baked geometry

If you prefer baked AO, reduce or disable SSAO (or restrict it to dynamic objects) so static crevices are not darkened a second time at runtime.

4. Tune the remaining AO intensity

With a single source active, dial its intensity and radius so occlusion reads as subtle contact shading rather than dirty black corners.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Reproduce it once with full context and the fix writes itself. The hunt is the expensive part.