03-23-2017, 04:44 PM
<a contenteditable="false" data-ipshover="" data-ipshover-target="<___base_url___>/index.php?/profile/12323-despo20/&do=hovercard" data-mentionid="12323" href="<___base_url___>/index.php?/profile/12323-despo20/">@despo20</a> I gave wrote a late night, brief overview at WOB that a few people have recently deciphered, with no images. Here are some images for you, perhaps I will put it together into a blender AO tutorial when I get a chance.
Image 1
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1 - We start off in the 'World' menu.
2 - First, change the 'Ambient Colour' to 150, 150, 150.
3 - Tick 'Ambient Occlusion' and open up this drop down menu. The first option is 'Factor' which is how strong the effect will be. The higher the number, the darker the shadows.
4 - You can select to multiply or add each trace. Multiply gives a darker shadow. So each scan is multiplied by a factor of 2.5 in this set up.
5 - Tick 'Environment Lighting'. I'm not sure how much of an effect it has, but I was battling dark shading across the whole thing when I went through this so decided to tick it just because.
6 - Same with 'Indirect Lighting'. I didn't change any of the settings of either of these two.
Image 2
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1 - Scroll down in the 'World' menu to find the 'Gather' drop down. Make sure 'Raytrace' is selected and it is set to 'Approximate'. Other settings give lower quality shadows (grainy).
2 - Attenuation - This is the distance between faces that will cast a shadow on one another. (note - this is my understanding of it!) AO is about the effect other faces have on the one that is being scanned. Blender will scan out in all directions from each face, and see what other faces there are to cast a shadow on it. Attenuation tells blender how far to look for another face. The default is 10 m (!!!) so any face within 10 meters will case a shadow, and result in a very dark AO all over! I use 20 cm, it seems to be a good one for definition on buildings. On smaller things I will go less, 5 cm for a tree or bush where many faces are close together. Play with this depending on the model to get the amount of shading you need, it is probably the most important thing for AO IMO.
3 - Samples - how many scans per face. The more you do, the longer it takes, the smoother the shading is.
There are also things like 'fall off' which is something to do with how quickly the shadow from another face stops having an effect, but I have not played with this yet.
Image 3
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You probably have used these already!
1 - Render menu
2 - Make sure normalized is ticked especially if you are using multi materials. This forces blender to assume all faces are bright white (ambient colour that we set earlier I think). If you don't do this, you can get dark/odd shading due to the textures applied to each face.
3 - Margin 10px. I don't know why, <a contenteditable="false" data-ipshover="" data-ipshover-target="<___base_url___>/index.php?/profile/6338-discrepancy/&do=hovercard" data-mentionid="6338" href="<___base_url___>/index.php?/profile/6338-discrepancy/">@Discrepancy</a> said to do it [img]<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/wink.png[/img]/emoticons/wink@2x.png 2x" title=";)" width="20" /> in his tutorial
