Beer glass scene creation
This course contains a little bit of everything with modeling, UVing, texturing and dynamics in Maya, as well as compositing multilayered EXR's in Photoshop.
# 1 21-07-2013 , 04:37 AM
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Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 22

AO pass returns strange results - Advice Needed

Hey folks. Hopefully the hive mind can help me figure out what's happened to my scene...

So I'm trying to create an Ambient Occlusion render pass for a big, funnel/whirlpool shaped smooth mesh and sphere (first pic), as viewed from a moving camera. I followed this basic tutorial from the web, and I get strange results (second pic). This is the result after I crank up the spread in the mib_amb_occlusion to 50 instead of the default .08 (which just produced whiteness).

Now, I have to mention that my scene objects are really massive; the distance from the camera to the most distant surface point was measured as something slightly over 1 million (default maya units). In my attempts to make this scene "feel" larger, I've been upscaling things quite a bit, testing things...and I think this might have something to do with it. I've been changing attributes exponentially in attempts to see results...but this render result is baffling me.

I tried creating a fresh scene, and making some simple geometric shapes to test the procedure. It worked just like it said it would. As troubleshooting goes, I then determine it's due to variables in the scene with the whirlpool.

I'm running Maya 2013 as well...any thoughts on what these renders indicate?

EDIT: here's also a wireframe>render comparison of the model up close, as opposed to the first set (pics 3 and 4). The result doesn't change with camera distance.

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Last edited by scentmental; 21-07-2013 at 06:38 AM.
# 2 22-07-2013 , 07:42 AM
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Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 22
I was able to get an AO pass by Exporting the mesh and camera rig to an .ma file, and rendering it out in that scene. Still, it would be nice to understand what was causing that strange AO render...

...but problem solved, anyway.

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