Maya Ambient Occlusion is too bright

Introduction to Maya - Rendering in Arnold

This course will look at the fundamentals of rendering in Arnold. We'll go through the different light types available, cameras, shaders, Arnold's render settings and finally how to split an image into render passes (AOV's), before we then reassemble it i

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# 1 20-06-2016 , 06:15 PM

Registered User
Join Date: Mar 2015

Posts: 4

Hi,

I am rendering some of my models using Mental Ray Ambient Occlusion but my problem is the render images are too bright. user added image

I changed the values but the result is same. Here are some of the renders :-

user added image

I Googled it but couldn't find any proper solution. user added image

So why my occlusion renders are so bright. The scene has default lights. I don't know why I am getting so bright renders. Hope you will help me to figure it out.

Thanks user added image

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# 2 21-06-2016 , 03:16 PM

EduSciVis-er
Join Date: Dec 2005

Location: Toronto

Posts: 3,374

Ambient occlusion doesn't use lights, and instead is a system to create shadowing in areas where light wouldn't directly strike as much. So all it does for a given point on your surface is to "look around" for nearby surfaces which would darken that point. In your ambient occlusion attributes, you can reduce the Bright attribute (whitest possible point) to a light gray, or lighten the Dark attribute (blackest possible point) to a dark grey.

But better would be perhaps to put a big poly plane over your characters (out of view) to create a darkening influence, and add a ground plane too. You can also play with the spread and max distance (0 is infinite) to adjust the AO look.

And best would be to actually combine your ambient occlusion render with a diffuse render with some actual lights, maybe even an HDR image as an IBL sphere.