I've been reading that it's best to delete the AO nodes from materials if rendering with iDL as it speeds things up.  Is there an easy way to do this without trawling through all the material pages as that seem quite crazy and time consuming.

Didn't know if there was an obvious tickbox or script that could be used.  I've found one script that will go through a material folder and rewrite all the files, but I'm nervous about making permenant changes to my runtime.  I'd rather run a script to nuke a scene's AO nodes before rendering.

anybody have any tips or suggestions?

Best wishes

Jody

There's one at RDNA by Semidieu that adds, adjusts, or removes AO from materials. Advanced AO Editor. And it has, I believe, been updated for Poser 9/2012.

Edit: However, it was my understanding that AO on props etc was disabled when you enabled IDL in your render settings.

If I'm wrong about that, I'd like to know.

That was my understanding too, but cannot find anything to back it up either.

The AO node is present but is not considered during IDL unless you tick on that option.  But since lighting improved dramatically with P7 and up there is no need for material AO.  And not all content have AO written into their material zones.  If you are using older skin textures, it may be better to convert those with EZSkin and take advantage of SSS for your renders.  Otherwise, to answer your original question, I haven't seen a current script dedicated to removing AO.

Hborre is exactly right.

The documentation is on page 381 of the Poser Pro 14 manual where it states in a discussion of setting AO options:

"Evaluate in IDL: Check this option if you want Poser to consider ambient occlusion settings during an indirect lighting pass."

It defaults to unchecked, ergo, AO IS NOT considered during IDL rendering.

ah great, thanks

I have a script by "gishzida" (which states that it "is based in part upon a Script by SVDL and a python script by JLK"), so you could go searching for that. It finds any and all AO material nodes in a scene and deletes them, so it's a bit of a blunt weapon.

It is literally about 20 lines of python script but I can't post it because it's not my work.

EDIT: I should have searched here first (and so should you).

Just read the parts of the Poser Pro 2012 manual relating to AO.

The evaluate in IDL checkbox is on the actual material node.

So, if whoever (whichever vendor) put AO on their materials went ahead and checked that box, you'd have to go through all those materials and uncheck it.

Might as well just remove the nodes altogether.

Thankfully, we have a script for it -- Thank you, cspear, for finding that for us. :)

-- 

On the other hand, if that vendor didn't check that box, no need to worry. If they didn't check the one you looked at, they probably didn't check any.

This is exactly what I was looking for, time to play...

Thanks everybody