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.

That baked texture should look like this

Then I used it in Photoshop, for reference. When done texture for plane looks like this.

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Then assign that texture to the shader of ground surface.

I also textured bridge. There I used some UV mapping tools such as Cylindrical mapping, and Planar mapping.

Sunlight has little overbright (1.5), and uses depth map shadows with 2k resolution and filter size of 2.

Now, to start preparation for Ambient Occlusion. First we need to create one UV set for all objects that will use Ambient Occlusion. So all objects in the scene will use single AO texture. To generate that UV’s we will use automatic mapping. Select geometry and go to create UV’s/automatic mapping option box (Maya 8 menus). Set planes to 6, and spacing to 1024. Also enable create new UV set, and set name to BakeSet. This will generate new UV’s in new uv set. By default all textures use default UV set (map1).

If you look at UV’s you will get something like this. If you want you can keep uv’s for ground plane, and just copy them from map1 set to BakeSet. Notice that uv’s overlap. This is bad.

To fix this select all uv’s and go to layout uv’s set non overlapping. This will arrange all uv’s in 0 to 1 uv space.

Notice that those uv’s stand in new UV set called BakeSet. We’ll use that set for AO texture.

For baking we’ll use Mental Ray, so make sure that MR is loaded. You can do that in window/settings preferences/plug-in manger. Scroll down to Mayatomr.mll, enable it if disabled.

Now if you hold right mouse button on any geometry in scene, in the bottom of the menu you can see baking submenu. In that menu choose assign new bake set / texture. This will create set of parameters for baking that relates to that object.

Name the set AmbOCC, and set mode to Occlusion.

Set rays to 64 or more, I used 256 and baking took hours. Higher this number smaller amount of noise you get, and greater render time.

Set resolution to 1k or 2k. These maps should be very big, since they will be applied to all objects.

Bake to one map means that all objects will use same map.

In the bottom enable override mesh UV assignments, and enter BakeSet for UV set name.

So AO will be rendered to 2k image using BakeSet UV’s.