I tried baked AO in the past but it did not look good.
If we have 2 parts inside each others,
The inner faces of the outer part & the outer faces of the inner part will be completely black.
You can move changeble/moveble parts far away from main model while baking and bake them separatly, so you will have good smooth shadows.
Unfortunately, we already have large number of models (hundreds).
Also we not only have animated models but also have a configurator to show/hide different parts.
Look at this tutorial how to easely unwrap and bake AO map.
Unfortunally implementstion of SSAO in the engine is very bad and theres no way for now to tweak it to get any good result. If you have programming skills you can use this SAO implementation from the three.js library to add to your demo. It’s much better. We have plans to improve SAO in the engine but we don’t know when we will have time for this.
Co-founder and lead graphics specialist at Soft8Soft.