Tutorials: Ambient Occlusion Baking / Dielectric Shader

[TogaMario]

Oh my wow! That is excellent stuff, Bill! It's helped me tons with achieving a nice multi-pass lighting setup. I think I can also use the texture baking for some of my game engine work and just make my levels in Maya with no worrys about exporting to a lightmapping program. You rock out loud, thanks!

P.S. Oh, if I were making a complex game level with several objects, I think I could use the attribute for baking it all on one map to make it more game-efficient, sound right to you? Can't wait to try all this out, thanks again :D

[epithius]

yeah I think if you use the bake to one map option, you can have multiple objects on a single map. I'm assuming all the objects would have to then share UV space and couldn't overlap.

I've never tried it, but it should work. If you can't get it going, I'll see if I can futz with it.

Thanks for the compliments!

Cheers,
Bill

[Ash-Man]

thanks Bill for sharing your knowldge

it's alwayes refershing to see people contbuting to socity
best of luck

[tracer7]

First of all thanks a ton for your tutorial, very helpful!

I do have a question though, some have recommended doing an occlusion pass by using the Final Gather texture shader instead "mib_fg_occlusion". They mention faster render times to smooth looking occlusion without having to crank up the samples on the standard occlusion method.

Have you tested the FG method? What would you recommend?

Thanks,
Palmer

[epithius]

I have tried using the mib_fg_occlusion node. It seemed to provide smoother results at less cost (at least with the smaller test scenes I was using), but I was never really able to find a way to tweak the results in the same manner as with the mib_amb_occlusion node. Thus I never really used it.

If you ever do find out more on it, please share!

Cheers,
Bill

[Gremlin]

Nice stuff man, I really liked the explination of those vaguely named attributes--that's probably my biggest problem with getting familiar with MR is not really knowing what the stuff does, because the names don't really help. :rolleyes:

Can't wait to see more of them...
Gremlin
:beer:

[tlggungor]

why surface shader its a diffucult way to make ao pass you use maya 7 open the render layer and create ao layer and take a simple ao pass

sorry my terrible eng..

but good tuto congr.

[ZippZopp]

nice! thanks so much for these

[epithius]

why surface shader its a diffucult way to make ao pass you use maya 7 open the render layer and create ao layer and take a simple ao pass

When you use the Ambient Occlusion preset with Maya 7, it creates the exact same network connections: an mib_amb_occlusion node to a surface shader. This is done because the mib_amb_occlusion node can be affected by light sources, hence no longer being 'ambient'. Using a surface shader assures that light's can't interfere. Try assigning the mib_amb_occlusion node directly to an object and place a light somewhere, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Thanks for the input!

Cheers,
Bill

[Andyfedak]

When you use the Ambient Occlusion preset with Maya 7, it creates the exact same network connections: an mib_amb_occlusion node to a surface shader. This is done because the mib_amb_occlusion node can be affected by light sources, hence no longer being 'ambient'. Using a surface shader assures that light's can't interfere. Try assigning the mib_amb_occlusion node directly to an object and place a light somewhere, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Thanks for the input!

Cheers,
Bill

Thanks for posting this stuff Bill, it's much appreciated. -a

[PaulAdams]

That Ambient Occlusion tutorial was amazing, really broke down allot of things and made them understandable. Really nice, thanks for making these!

[epithius]

That Ambient Occlusion tutorial was amazing, really broke down allot of things and made them understandable. Really nice, thanks for making these!

Thanks to you and everyone for the great feedback! Once I find time in this hectic move, I'll be posting a new one on Anisotropic Blurred Reflections w/ Mental Ray.

Cheers,
Bill

[rsalonen]

Thanks alot for creating and sharing these! Very informative and interesting to watch.
Got some nice insight in how MR shaders work, never really used them before, but now i feel inspired to try them out more!

Looking forward for future ones! :thumbsup:

[de_tomato]

Its was clear and informative! Never expect something like this to be free. Thanks a lot! And congratulation on making us all happy!


Cheers!

[redforty]

Wow! These tuts are amazing and so very informative!
And you aren't condescending, either. I like the way you explain things, too.

Thanks!

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