About Directional AO - Arnold/Redshift

[sherrog]

someone’s message…
To start with I tried rendering an AO pass in Redshift as my main renderer but I got a crash, so I went the shader route and started to plug a rsAmbientOcclusion node to a rsMaterial since rsArchitectural is deprecated albeit having an internal AO option. For directional AO I was using a SurfaceLuminance node back in the days but it seems to not be supported in RedShift so I went back to Arnold and started building a custom shading network with a matteshadow. Now I would like to know your opinion on this workflow and/or if there’s a better way to do it, mainly in Redshift. My biggest concern is that as it is now AO is occurring within casted Shadows, but probably not accounting for GI light contribution in the shadows. In Arnold it seems to take the “Indirect” contribution into account but not sure how I can translate this to Redshift. Thank you.

[SePu]

for RS to get an AO pass you have output as a custom AOV like this.