Quote - What's the best method to have ambient occlusion applied to the whole scene if light based AO is still inadequate? Is there a way to use your VSS PR3 AO nodes to apply mat based AO to all of the surfaces in a scene?

In theory, that would be a good way. Basically, you'd want to set up all your shaders in your VSS prop. Every material in your scene could be managed this way. Then you'd just synchronize everything.

Of course, the lack of a UI in the current version makes this way too hard.

I suppose I could build additional features in VSS that would add material AO to all your scene materials, without actually having those shaders come from VSS.

I think that's what face_off's Occlusion Master does. I believe it adds AO to anything, and then gives you a GUI to adjust the AO parameter for every material. I believe it does not do that in a VSS way. Meaning, if you have 20 material zones on a prop or figure, you'll be able to add AO in one click, but you'll have to make changes to the parameters 20 times, even if you want the same values everywhere on the figure.

My way would be to create a material template for each real material in your scene. For example, you might have some leather (for furniture), some wood, some plastic, some metal, etc. Each material you use in your scene, you'd want to load into VSS. You'd then tell VSS where all these materials go (with a nice GUI, of course). No matter how many leather chairs you have, you'd still want the seat cushions to have the same shader, so VSS would be a big time-saver there. Even if it means spending 3 hours settting up your control prop with all these materials, I figure after that you'd save a ton of time being able to change a given material in one place.

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