Ambient Occulsion

So it turns out, when I made my first animation using ambient occlusion, it wasn't correct, I have since done it properly!

I have used ambient occlusion as it gives a music greater depth to objects, and makes them look more 3d to stop them looking so flat.

The first thing I had to do was make sure that the light accepts/creates shadows, but change the shadow map to the mental ray shadow map.  Change the map size up, to 2048, sample range to 1, and samples to 24.  The map size is how accurate the shadows will be, the higher the value the more time it will take to process.  The sample range controls how soft the shadows will be, the higher the value the softer they will become.  Finally, samples is the amount of samples removed from a shadow, this makes the shadow deeper, and softer.


I had to make a mental ray ambient occlusion texture, changing from standard to mental ray, and then an ambient occlusion material.  Once I had done that I then needed to change the surface





















The surfaces values then needed to be changed, samples to 128, more samples creates a smoother shadow.  Spread to 1.0, spread is like a cone object the object, values ranging between 0.0 and 1.0, 0.0 pointing in a single direction, and 1.0 effectively being open to the whole object, this generates the size of the shadow.  Max distance set to 20.0, this is the distance that the shadow is generated to.

Here is the render setup, now that I have created my ambient occlusion texture, I need to change the Material Override so that the ambient material I have created is put across all objects in the scene, as I have many different materials, this would be the same as changing every material but is much quicker.

Firstly I have to enable the material override, and then drag and drop the material onto the Material: box, this bring up a window asking for an instance, or a copy, I made an instance as when I tried copy it wanted to make another material.  This seemed unnecessary.

























The last thing I needed to do was to change the renderer.

Initially it is set to Filter > Type: Gauss, but in this instance I changed to Mitchell.   This is because after some research Mitchell gives the best overall results.

I changed the minimum samples to 4, and the maximum to 20, this improves the quality of the render without the big increase on rendering time as it does when changing the Quality.


























The final outcome!

This is the view of the TIE cockpit from the pilot.

References:

Devead. U, 2014. Three Ways to Generate Ambient Occlusion in 3ds Max. [online] Available at: <http://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/three-ways-to-generate-ambient-occlusion-in-3ds-max--cms-21612> [Accessed 02 December 2015]

Knowledge.Autodesk, 2014. Mental Ray Shadow Map Rollout. [online] Available at: <https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-14B352AE-FBF2-416F-8170-93DACE23E4DF-htm.html> [Accessed on 03 December 2015]

Docs.Autodesk, 2014. Occlusion. [online] Available at: <http://docs.autodesk.com/MENTALRAY/2015/ENU/mental-ray-help//files/shaders/reference/occlusion.html> [Accessed 03 December 2015]

Knowledge.Autodesk, 2014. Sample Quality Rollout (Mental Ray Renderer) [online] Available at: <https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-DBFFF24F-5419-492B-8889-24E546029279-htm.html> [Accessed 03 December 2015]