I lied

I know I said my next post would be about HOW to do ambiant occlusion... but I wanted to put something up from what i've been working on. Here are some movies... do enjoy. they are from a class project we've been doing in 3D Animation Studio:

Ambient Occlusion

What is it? How does it work? Why am I asking you?

At this time last week I had heard of AO (Ambient Occlusion) but I had never used it... nor did I know how to apply it to my renders in Maya. I didn't think anything of it, and honestly, because I did not know what it was, I did not think I needed it for my renders. I was wrong. AO adds dimension to a render, and makes something simple look amazing with a few clicks. I was working on a class project with a friend (Bewsii, I'll add a link to his work once I find one), and I was showing him my renders and he said "Hmm, looks good but it also looks flat, why not add an AO render to the mix?" Neither of us had any clue how to do that in Maya (He models objects over animating, and as such uses 3DS Max for his work). I hopped online and looked for a tutorial, I found a couple painful and annoying tutorials, of which I pieced together a working method to add AO to any Maya scene.  I will share my method in my next post, this is really just an overview, also, I'm long winded, so I figure I'll do all the talky stuff here and for those of you tl;dr folks out there, you can just skip ahead.

So what is AO, and what does it do? It is the process of gathering information among a scene to add shading in places where objects meet, such as creases corners, indentation and such. Yeah, I don't make with the explaining things properly... So please allow me to show you. Here is a scene in Maya, everything in it is just shiny Blinn material with color, and one area light. I left the shadows off for this image:

Shiny :D (but not so pretty)

So I used my method for AO and rendered it and got this:

Pasty... this is a really good way of showing what AO is... So, adding them together is simply a matter of taking both images into a program with layers and adding the 'multiply' function to the AO layer while it is above the diffuse layer. I'll show how to do that in my tutorial, but here is the final result:

The file got squished in the render, I'll fix that before I make the tutorial. if we compare the two images side by side we get:

it looks so much better with a few simple adjustments... You can even do it to animation!

As you can see AO adds depth to the room. It takes a while to render, but in the end it is well worth it.