[TEC] Ambient Occlusion Tutorial

[rodan54]

This, hopefully easy to understand, tutorial is meant to allow prospective and current SH4 modelers a means to create those tricky Ambient Occlusion texture maps for their future shipping releases.

Anyhoo, before getting started I just want to make a few notes.

1. This was all done in 3dsmax 9, so methods in other modeling suites may vary.
2. This is done using a completely original Mesh, so don't assume that it works in the same way for modded/kitbashed stock ships although I'd imagine it'd be pretty similar.
3. I haven't spent too much time adjusting the various parameters mentioned throughout this tutorial, so feel free to experiment.
4. Finally, I don't claim to be literate with 3dsmax in anyway shape or form, and am still slowly learning; therefore, if there are any errors, ommissions, or perhaps better methods than what is desribed here, then please do say so.

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Lets begin.

1. First of course you'll need to load up your model into max. Once that is done then navigate along the top menu bar to 'Rendering', and click on 'Render' in the roll down menu. This will bring up the 'Render Scene Dialog'. Now under the 'Common' tab navigate all the way down to the bottom and expand out the menu with the header 'Assign Renderer', click on the box next to 'Production' and select Mental Ray as the rederer. Click "Ok" and close out the 'Render Scene Dialog'.



2. Alright now with your ship selected, go back to the 'Rendering' menu list and select 'Render to Texture' which will open a new menu. For this perticular example my Tone model was not uv mapped, so in the 'Mapping Coordinates' section I have 'use automatic unwrap' checked which will generate new uv coordinates to be used by the Ambient occlusion map.



3. Just below the 'Mapping Coordinates' section is the 'Output' roll out in which you'll want to add an 'Ambient Occlusion (MR)' from the list of available options that opens up.



4. Once that's done then scroll down a bit more, and set the maps size for 1024x1024. In addition set the number of samples to 80 and spread to 1.0 in the 'Selected Element Unique Settings' section. Also under 'Automatic Unwrap Mapping' set the spacing to 0. Leave everything else as is and click 'Render'.



5. It might take a little while for max to compute all the numbers, so go get a cup of coffee while you wait. Once max is done rendering, and if you followed the tutorial properly then there will be a texture at the location specified previously under 'General Settings' in the 'Render to Texture' menu that should look something similar to this.



Hmm, not too bad.
Here's the Tone with ^ applied. And yes she is a WIP just in case anyone felt like pointing out her missing anchors.



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