free maya tutorials : Baking Ambient Occlusion Using Mental Ray

Written by Dzordz
Saturday, 10 February 2007
Page 1 of 2
Ambient occlusion can be very useful for adding details to shadows of your images.
But also it can be extremely expensive to calculate for every frame of your animation.



Ambient occlusion can be very useful for adding details to shadows of your images.
But also it can be extremely expensive to calculate for every frame of your animation.
If you have scene that is very static (camera flying trough environment), you can render ambient occlusion to texture and assign that texture to ambient attribute of your shaders. That way the scene will render very fast.
Before entering this tutorial I recommend you to read my tutorial for making lava shader, to get basic knowledge about hypershade and texturing in Maya.
In our example I modeled simple terrain using poly plane and one bridge going across. I also added one directional light (sunlight).
For texturing I used Photoshop. Here’s one very useful tip if you are going to use Photoshop for texturing. Assign lambert to plane (ground plane) and go to hypershade. Select plane and lambert you just assigned to it. Then in hypershade menu go to edit/convert to file texture (Maya software). Set bake shading group lighting. This will bake illumination to texture. Also surface shader is created and assigned to object. Delete that surface shader, and assign lambert to plane. Baked texture is located in sourceimages subfolder of your project. MORE