Hi all, for the last few months I've been reading about Ambient Occlusion
techniques used by the high-end renderer$ and it seems pretty common to have a
render pass for AO, a "pretty" pass for texture and lighting, and maybe even
have a transparency pass, specular pass, media pass, photon pass, etc.,  that
are all composited into a final image. I suppose that's similar to doing a
save/load radiosity pass and a save/load photon pass rendered into a final POV
image...  except those big money renderer$ apparently use shader "slots" that
are wired together in various ways to make all kinds of crazy combinations of
realistic rendering voodoo...

Well, I'm a POV guy so that's all a bit foreign to me, so I hacked out a few
passes today to see if AO would really make a noticeable difference in my
renders. I used radiosity with a highly ambient sky_sphere to render a
monochrome AO "mask" (no lights), followed by a fully textured version with
lights.

Okay, maybe I just haven't been keeping up with latest techniques, and maybe

that this type of AO compositing can make quite a difference in the final image
quality... here's an example.

Cheers,
Rob

"Yeay! Wrath of the Lich King is just around the corner!"  <-- WoW geek

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