False Ambient Occlusion

[Draise]

This is a short little example of how I make false ambient occlusion.

The scene runs at 15 or so frames a second on my 1 gig vid ram Nvidia card, cause I was testing my video card and the light quality.

This scene was created with 3 lights.

Each light has a size of 200

1 Directional light - Sun

Positioned at a semi low angle for large shadows. Full filter quality, with a medium small filter size. It has a shadowmap of 6000.

2 Directional Light - Atmosphere

These lights are positioned at very very low angles with each a light blue color, slightly purple, to simulate the atmosphere bounce fill. Each has a shadow map of 5000 with full filter quality and very high filter sizes. They give the world some nice little gradient shadows that get occluded by objects, corners, etc.

I have the light samples quite high in the scene, but I am not sure why or what it does yet.

An example of such lights, at a lower quality, can be seen on my cartoon catapillar. =)

Enjoy! Maybe I'll upload the lights and scenes oneday, or perfect them and upload them later.

Just a quick little way to fool the big guys who take minutes, sometimes hours, per frame making a convincing light setup.

=)

[v3rd3]

interesting piece draise... keep em coming

[froo]

Damn dude. Very nice!

[Peter]

Absolutely love it. Will definitely use this technique

[Draise]

Update! I have made a semi sphere of an AO light rig. I have also encapsulated it and made floats to control all the lights at a time. So now you can set up an AO scene quite quickly in realtime.

It's not really true AO algorithms, but it looks good enough.

AO light Rig.zip

(211.88 KiB) Downloaded 322 times

Tips:
Load it as an object.
Have darker colors for all lights, since it is mostly ambiental.
Have medium low shadowmaps. The higher the map, the darker the occlusion, but slower frame rates.
Have low sample rates. This is the quality, and if you have it to high, your computer will slow down a lot. Only for final output renders do you put it up.
Keep the filtersize resonably medium to high. The higher it is, the less muddy thescene looks. You will need to balance the muddiness with occlusion carefully as to not loose the occlusion.

Enjoy!

[Draise]

Another example with higher quality and more objects! Enjoy!

[v3rd3]

Thank you Draise this is very interesting.

[Draise]

Download AO Light Rig 2.0 and 2.1 (partial)


I have been using another version of this false AO light rig lately, and Cellulo kindly asked me to share it, for his website. I decided to share it here also. Later I will release my AO+IBL light rig.

These rigs are intended for heavy duty video cards, as the mathematics can get heavy quite quickly. For most integrated graphics cards, this will NOT work and probably crash TS.

!	For optimum results with your card, start with low Map Size values (128 - 512) and very low Sample values (1 - 3) before increasing to higher values for quality and final renders.

the AO light rig 2.0 is a spherical rig, and the AO light rig 2.1 partial is a sky only (semi spherical) rig.

Hope you can enjoy these! I do!

[trueBlue]

With permission from Draise, here is modified versions of his Ambient Occlusion lights for trueSpace 7.61 Workspace.
I deleted all of the Mesh, and Object Render Attributes nodes. It reduces the file size by over 1/2 MB.
In theory this should Load and Animate faster.
Saved them as RsSLgts.
WS - Ambient Occlusion Spherical.RsSLgts
WS - Ambient Occlusion Dome.RsSLgts