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In Lightwave we have it, its a free plugin! Sorry Max freaks....

check: http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~goetsch/AmbOcc/

I'd be for an ambient occlusion shader for Maxwell. I mean, Mental Ray has one, Brazil has one, vRay has one, Cinema 4D has one...

Well, you could bake AO in every major 3D package if you like to stress the effect. However, where's the beef?

AO is great with standard renderers, that do not do "real" lighting calculations. I fail to see where it could benefit a Maxwell renderer (except when you would use it as a dirt renderer).

If you think about it: Maxwell has AO build right in it's heart, because it is a renderer that does the full energy calculation, not just the limited one regarding the near field that AO does..

Cheers

Kabe

A good solution would be to bake the AO pass in one of the main apps mentioned and place this in the diffusion channel which in maxwell render terms should be the specular channel. Maxwell Render equivalent of diffusion channel is specular if I remember correctly.

Kabe wrote:Well, you could bake AO in every major 3D package if you like to stress the effect. However, where's the beef?

AO is great with standard renderers, that do not do "real" lighting calculations. I fail to see where it could benefit a Maxwell renderer (except when you would use it as a dirt renderer).

If you think about it: Maxwell has AO build right in it's heart, because it is a renderer that does the full energy calculation, not just the limited one regarding the near field that AO does..

Cheers

Kabe

Well it's called Dirt shader because you can also use if for dirt. Does Maxwell have that in it's heart?:)

... I have seen this wish some weeks befor here. Try to use the search function for the wish section.

The problem with all Maxwells realism is that sometimes it don't look right and effects like Ambient Occlusion (even though not accurate) can get the image how its intended to be.

However, ambient occlusion seems to work best as a seperate pass at render time.

Imagine having this in Maxwells single pass output, the render took a long time and you didn't like the result or wished to change it.

Seems easier to render Ambient Occlusion in the 3D software and use a paint program to blend with the Maxwell image.

If you need an image to look like it's been rendered with ambient occlusion, why use Maxwell at all?

Mihai Iliuta: Some people like dirt in their nooks and cranies! - try doing that in Maxwell without lots of work pre applying it to textures.

Then talk about dirt, not ambient occlusion
It would be nice if we had the ability to apply layers of shaders based on incidence angle and so on. But pure ambient occlusion, I don't see the use for it Maxwell.

To me Dirt and Ambient Occlusion are the same thing. For example Maxons Cinema4D dropped the dirt shader and dirt baker, using Ambient Occlusion instead.

So, in some situation Ambient Occlusion works better and faster than using shaders (ie: in scenes with many objects).

Take one of the many ultra clean Maxwell renders of a fawn room - apply an Ambient Occlusion pass as postwork - the unatural sterile room is now more realistic.

error404: and time!