Ambient Occlusion | MrBluesummers.com

Ambient Occlusion Mix Map

Written April 28th, 2009
Categories: Effects, Materials / Shaders, Videos
6 comments

Hey All,

Sorry for the incredible wait in getting this Monday Movie uploaded. YouTube was down for a while, and my original encoding crashed so I had to do it twice.

This week we’re looking at how you can use 3d Studio Max Ambient Occlusion either on its own or as part of a mix map. It’s a quick and easy way to add some shadowing directly to your model, and helps make your details pop. I’ll cover some of the parameters of the Ambient Occlusion map (which I don’t think I’ve done in detail in the past). I’ll also demonstrate how to use ambient occlusion as a mix controller to blend two other maps (or materials) together.

Baking Ambient Occlusion

Written March 23rd, 2009
Categories: Effects, Rendering / Compositing, Videos
10 comments

This week’s Monday Movie shows you how to bake an ambient occlusion map for an object in 3dsMax. It’s actually a much easier process than you’d think. Here, I’ll show you how to use the Render-to-Texture tool with mental ray’s Ambient Occlusion pass. The resultant image can be used to either visualize your object in the viewport, or as part of your texturing process!

Clay Rendering vs Ambient Occlusion

Written January 25th, 2009
Categories: Effects, Rendering / Compositing, Videos
3 comments

Clay rendering in 3dsMax is probably the most important skill every arch-viz student and practitioner should have. It not only lets you rapidly create good looking renders for the client, but it also helps you down the line when composting your final shots.

This Monday Movie looks at the difference between a traditional clay render, an ambient occlusion render, and an ambient occlusion pass. The differences are crucial to knowing when to use one over the other. To summarize, the clay render is the easiest to setup but the slowest to render and least flexible of the 3. The ambient occlusion render is harder to set up, but it’s got more flexibility to it. However, neither one can replace a true ambient occlusion pass, which is always good to know how to do.

Note that I don’t cover how to get your AO pass to handle displacement and bump-maps. We’ll have to cover that another day! By the way, is this not the crispest YouTube embed you’ve ever seen?

Making of the Mother Love

Written June 18th, 2008
Categories: Articles, Modeling, Modo, Offsite, Rendering / Compositing, Textures / Materials
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“This image is created for the CGArena challenge themed “Beautiful” and I won the second prize for this image. Thanks for all the sponsors and CGArena. The concept was to show a rough stone statue in a cold autumn environment. The statue represents a mother breast feeding and where the baby’s mouth touches the breast, the stone becomes warm flesh, showing love and humanity. I had my first baby 18 months ago and for me the image of his mother breast feeding was of an absolute beauty! I’m using Lightwave and Modo for all my modeling.”

Quickstart Series – Part 10

Written June 18th, 2008
Categories: Mudbox, Offsite, Textures / Materials, Videos
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“This quickstart series contains the information and techniques that can’t be found anywhere else and an equal split between workflows came up with by Dave Cardwell and those invented by Wayne Robson. In these 2 video tutorials you will learn about Baking Ambient Occlusion Maps and Wayne’s ambient Occlusion Map Trick added in SP1. Before this part we already released 9 parts, links can be found on the bottom of this page.”

Showcasing the Model

Written June 18th, 2008
Categories: Mudbox, Offsite, Rendering / Compositing, Videos
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In this series of tutorials I’ll be showcasing different ways to present your models. I start by showing an interesting way of making an object appear as if it’s being constructed from the ground up.

Making of Veggie Pirates

Written June 18th, 2008
Categories: Articles, Lighting, Modeling, Offsite, Rendering / Compositing, Softimage XSI, Textures / Materials
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“Hi, my name is Gaurav Mohan and in this tutorial I will go over the techniques I used in creating my entry ‘Veggie Pirates’ for the CGArena Toon challenge. Toonish scenes and characters have always been a favorite of mine so this was a fun theme for me. I used the Softimage XSI 6.02, Zbrush 3.0, Photoshop CS3, Roadkill Pelt Mapper in the creation of this image.”

Ambient Occlusion with Alpha maps

Written June 18th, 2008
Categories: 3d Studio Max, Articles, Offsite, Rendering / Compositing, Textures / Materials
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This tutorial is for all my 3d artist friends out there & it’s all about using ambient occlusion in 3ds max with the help of just mental ray. Ambient occlusion is a widely used pass in industry level these days.