Ambient Occlusion setup
 

Can someone point me to a good tutorial on setting up an ambient occlusion render in maya..thanks Im on maya 09.

Hi,

1: Assign a Surface Shader to your objects;

2: Assign a mental ray mib ambient occlusion texture to the Surface Shader's "out colour" attribute;

and render with mental ray. No need for final gathering to be activated.

Tweak sample setting in the ambient occlusion texture to improve the quality and vary the distance if you want to change the spread of the occlusion.

cheers

gubar

Is the preset gone in the render layers menu for this? I dont have 2009 just yet so....try right clicking a render layer to see if presets are still available on the layer, if so hit ambient occlusion and render away

J

I think in 2009 the render preset may have gone jay. There may be another quick way to do it via the new pass system but I don't know of it.

The way I mentioned is pretty quick and easy too though.

cheers

gubar

Cheers dude just thought I'd ask. Yeah the shader is easy too...

Later
J

For AO renders, another option is to go to render layers, then create a new render layer. click on the layer and click attributes go to layer presets click it and select ambient occlusion, then you can add objects to this layer and they will rendered in AO - this is new to maya 2009

I have been trying to figure this out for a little while, so thanks very much for the info. I think the right-click to preset option must be gone, because I can't find it or I am blind, but I was able to find the preset in the attributes for the render layer.

As far as I can see, this causes the same thing as what gubar suggested (i.e. assigning mib amb occlusion texture to the out colour of a surface shader).

Only trouble is... when I try gubar's method, I get a black background with all white where the objects are, similar to what an alpha channel would look like. When I try the render preset method, I do get some shading where there's supposed to be shading, but the background is white, and almost everything else is white too, not much shading going on. I've tweaked some settings, but I can't figure out what's different between these two options; they should do the same thing?

Thanks for any thoughts. I'm looking forward to finally rendering something instead of screenshots all the time.

make your new render layer

assign all the objects to it (or just select the objects before hand and make a render layer with the selected objects)

then go into your render settings, switch to mental ray

in the passes tab click one of the buttons on the right of the scene passes white box thing
then click on the down arrow beneath it with the +

then hit batch render and you get your occlusion and master beauty pass

that's how it's meant to work i think...

Quote:

For AO renders, another option is to go to render layers, then create a new render layer. click on the layer and click attributes go to layer presets click it and select ambient occlusion, then you can add objects to this layer and they will rendered in AO - this is new to maya 2009

I know its not always possible on long threads but on a short one please make sure you read previous posts before replying. I mentioned this earlier as its a Maya2008 option, nice to know they kept it for 2009 though, life is still easy!

Jay

...just pointing out the other to do it....

Chirone:

was refering to To la Bombs post mate, Ive not highlighted your quote mate;)

Jay

i knew that *whistles innocently and toddles off* :blush:

LOL top man!!

happy easter btw

J

Actually this post was helpful for me, because I think it highlights the difference between finding the occ preset in 2008 and 2009 which I was unable to find earlier. I don't mind when people share slightly different variations, but I agree that exact duplicate answers are unnecessary.

And happy easter everyone!