How do you do a regular render and have ambient occlusion calculated? I always have just done bakes of my ambient occlusion and am curious how to render it from a maya camera.
Thanks Bill
You can attach the ambient occlusion node directly to the ambient channel of your shader. Then under the mental ray tab of the shader turn your irridiance down from white to like 20%. That way you can render ambient occlusion directly in conjunction with the rest of the shader network. That way no need to composite the AO pass, all done at once. Viola!
Cheers,
Gary
That works great. One question though, what if I still want the material to have some ambient color and the AmbientOc? How would I go about that?
Bill
Not sure if you could do that easily. The ambient amount is going to want to ‘override’ the darker areas caused by increase in ambient lighting on the surface(s). It would be best to run a second pass for the AO and then ‘add’ it to your texture in post, like Photoshop or Shake.
Cheers,
Gary