I saw a post a few days back about problems controlling material based AO. After experimenting with it, I too found that the strength parameter DOES NOTHING. I have Poser 6 SR2. I didn't see any post about whether this was really true or was operator error of some kind. Anyways, if it is true, I've found some workarounds. My next post will show some tips and results. Third post will have the material room settings. Don't take my settings as the final be-all end-all for AO. You always have to tweak and adjust. I'm just trying to show how you can get more control over the darn thing.

Very nice. Thanks for the post. I'll have to start playing with AO now.

Very cool! As I'm a Material Room dunce, what does the N node do?

The "N" node is the value of the Normal vector at the point on the surface that the shader is being evaluated at.

N stands for "Normal. The Normal of point on a surface is a vector (think arrow) that points exactly out of the surface. Curved surfaces have different normals at different points. Flat surfaces have the same normal at every point. Any 3d vector, including normals, can be described with 3 numbers, the X, Y, and Z components of the vector. So if I told you that the normal of a surface (in poser space) is 0,1,0, you would know that the surface is pointing straight up. The "N" node allows you to retrieve the Normal of the surface at every point that the shader is evaluated. It multiplies each of the components by the parameter you type in. The output of the "N" node is actually 3 values, but plugging it into a numerical input causes the 3 to be added together and divided by 3. Now it turns out that for vectors there is a very interesting operation called the "dot product". Without getting into too much detail, it basically tells you how aligned two vectors are. If one vector was (a,b,c) and the other was (x,y,z) then the dot product is ax + by + cz. The dot product is biggest when they are perfectly aligned. It is smallest when they point in opposite directions. It is 0 when they are perpendicular. Basically the "N" node does dot products. Because the "N" node is actually doing the multiply of (x,y,z) with those three parameters, then I can detect alignment with any vector I want by typing in the (a,b,c) value for the vector I'm interested in. In the case above, it was straight up, which is (0,1,0). So the "N" node is giving me a value of 1/3 when the surface is straight up. Its giving a value of 0 when the surface is horizontal (like a wall). Its giving a value of -1/3 when the surface is straight down (like a ceiling). Since a blend function only pays attention to values from 0 to 1, it works pretty good to use the "N" node to control the blend. But since I wanted amount of AO even for horizontals, I added .2 to it. So effectively my value into the blend is somewhere between -.1333 and .53333.

BagginsBill is my god; Bookmarked!

OMG I actually understood most of the N-node stuff O_o

bagginsbill! Extermly useful stuff.

or plug N node into component node :P otherwise the N node, if plugged into colors, outputs R G B

Very interesting and useful information, thank you for sharing it.