Global Illumination & Ambient Occlusion
 

I know this might seem lazy or lame but does anyone know of a good tutorial on how to produce GI renders using HDRI and any on how to setup Ambient Occlusion?

I have checked the Maya help but it is a bit of a minefield...

gi is generated by a light so if you create a light like a spot and want some gi check the gi option in the render globals then you can adjust the number of photons and so on heres a link to a tut. http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorial.../global_01.asp
http://www.3dtotal.com/team/tutorial...rofaneray1.asp

as for ambient occlusion in the render layers select everything in the scene and create a render layer right click on the layer and go to presets and select occulsion. but youll need to adjust the shader on the occlusion layer select the blue circle and the attribute editor will pop up click on the arrow next to the out colour and change the distance to 1

Thank you very much younglion:beer:

I have had a quick look at this and it looks like just the thing I need to get me started.

I did have another look through the Maya manual and discovered (after I had posted) a tutorial on Global Illumination - I obviously didn't look hard enough but this look more like the ticket.

See I have a few models I did that I would like to re-render using GI to make them look a little more upto date, once I have finished texturing them that is...;)