I decided that I wanted to try AO on a per material basic, since I read that it is better than using AO on an IBL and wont bring the render to a crawl as bad.  I plugged an AO node into the diffuse color channel and plugged the shader tree into that.  When I rendered the scene, the material with the AO node was snow white.  Obviously I did something wrong =P.  I am using the Unimesh Realism kit by face_off as well on the figure.

Could some kind soul point me in the right direction to do this?  I guess I could always buy a copy of Occlusion Master and have it done automagically too....that is why I have the realism kit, although it would be fun trying to learn to do all of this on my own.....trying to learn 3ds Max on the side too (that's another story in itself).

Not sure if P5 had this, but I'm pretty sure in P6 you can use one of the wacros to set up the AO for you.  You may need to tweak it, but it should be wired correctly.  If I'm wrong, I plead Altzheimers.  It's been a while ;)

John

I just found face_off's tutorial on AO and it seems pretty straight forward, although time consuming, but I do have a question about it.  In the tut he says to use the set up AO wacro to get the node initialy.  He goes on to say that if there is anything plugged into Alt_Specular or Alt_Diffuse, the nodes need to be set up by hand using a color math node in those channels with whatever else plugged into that.  My question is does this replace the AO node that the wacro set up or is it in addition to it?  If it replaces it, how do you set the samples, ray bias, etc...?  And, if there is only something plugged into the alt_specular, is the color math node needed in alt_diffuse or only in alt_specular?

I always use the Wacro as BeyondVR says and tweak if required! [I'm lazy!].

You can use the single AO node that the wacro brings in. However, if you have anything set in the alt.diffuse/alt.specular channels, then unplug the relevant 'original' channel (diffuse or specular value). From the alt. diffuse/specular channel, plug into a maths function node. Set it to multiply, and add the nodes that were originally set to that alternate node into value one. Then set the AO node into value 2.

I hope that makes sense. If not, let me know, and I'll try and come up with seom screenshots later.

jonthecelt

It sounds to me as if you should use Color_Math, or you'll get a grey-scale output.

Color_math probably would work better, if you have a coloured input going in. Never considered that, because if I'm using the alt. specular channel, it tends t0 be a node-based input, and so math_functions works fine.

jonthecelt

Thanks for all the input.  You have cleared up some of the points on the tutorial that were not so clear.  I'm going to give this a try and see how it comes out.  I know the render is going to take forever since I will be doing AO and a lot of reflections.

That's EXACTLY how I was describing it! :)

jonthecelt

Cool!  I guess it's now time to go through the entire figure and set this up and give it a go.

On a side note (not even remotely related to this) I have noticed that when I look at the shader nodes that the unimesh realism kit set up, or when looking at some tutorials, there are custom names on a lot of the nodes.  I was just wondering how to go about renaming the nodes to something other than color_math 7 or the like.  Can this be done manually, or only when the nodes are set up using a python script?

Quote - ..  Can this be done manually..

Yes, it's not so difficult.

Open up the file in your text editor.
Find the present name of the node that you see on screen.
It will  be something like...

node "math_functions" "Mul_3"

a couple of lines down you'll see:

name "Mul_3"

Change this to whatever name you want to appear on the screen

name "My magic node"

Save and you're done.

Rô