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.

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 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?