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# 1 05-12-2009 , 08:04 AM
DonnieBrasco2069's Avatar
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Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Santa Monica, CA
Posts: 20

Ambient Occlusion

Hey guys, sorry if this isn't the right forum for this question. I'm new here =)

Okay, so I'm learning Maya and building my scene, but when it came time to figure out ambient occlusion, things got a little nuts. I've heard about 10 different ways to pull this off with not just the mib_amb_occlusion node but also the mib_fg_occlusion node. Here's what I've heard:

1. Attach the amb_occ node to the out color on a surface shader. The problem is I want to be able to render out a frame to see what the finished product is going to look like BEFORE compositing. It also sounds tedious to output the passes of a single frame, go to your comp program, combine them there, and then see what tweaking needs to be done. Using Maya for all this is much simpler.

2. Using Maya render layers to render out an amb_occ pass to all objects in that layer. The problem is the same as #1 - in order to see the finished product, I have to go to comp.

3. Attaching the mib_amb_occlusion node to the shader of an area light. I've actually tried to do this, but I honestly didn't see much difference in the finished product. Has anyone had more success?

My solution: I've actually gotten the best results by doing the following--take your mib_amb_occlusion node, then take an RGB to Luminance utility and connect them (outValue to value). The reason is that amb_occ uses three values and I needed to make them one value for the next step...connecting the Luminance to the DIFFUSE of your model (since DIFFUSE is a single value). This seems to give me very good results which I can render and tweak in Maya, even though I've never read of anyone doing it this way.

So my question is, what's the best way? Has anyone ever heard of the way I did it? I've attached a pic of my model. There only ambient light in the scene is a dome of directional lights set VERY low. Any help or suggestions would be great.

Thanks!

-D

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