Is there a way to do an occlusion pass in Carrara 4? I looked in the manual and the only reference to occlusion was an "occlusion test". Somehow I don't think that's what I'm looking for. David

Presumably you mean 'ambient occlusion'. There's no reason why you shouldn't do this in Carrara but it will need some experimentation. Anyhow, to start with, try this: First build yourself a shader that is white or nearly so and has no highlight or shininess. Apply that to everything in your scene. Turn off ambient light and the other lights in your scene. Now click Scene>Atmosphere and choose Sky. Change the color of the sky and ground to white and switch off the cloud layers. Flip to the Render Room and render with Skylight and Indirect light switch on. Composite this with your color/shadow/specularity passes using multiply in Phostoshop, adjusting levels to get the effect your after. HTH, Mark

Yeah that's what I meant. Thanks for the info. Wish there was a script you could run that would do this. Poser 6 had one and I've been kind of spoiled by it. David

Attached Link: http://www.digitalcarversguild.com

Scripting would be a nice addition to Carrara. The time consuming here would be applying the same shader to all the objects in your scene. But if you've not got it, check out Shader Ops from DCG; it has this function.

You can easily just select all objects. Group them, and apply the shader to the group, then apply to children, and all objects should have the white shader.

You can get about the same effect with the diffuse filter in photoshop. Brian

Brian it might look about the same but would not give you the enviormental light model you'd be looking for by using AO: At SIGGRAPH 2002, technical directors from Industrial Light and Magic presented a technique they call ambient occlusion. Simple, but highly effective, ambient occlusion's been used for years at studios like BlueSky and ILM to achieve grounded realism, without the cost of full global illumination. Fancy name aside, ambient occlusion is simply a ratio of how much ambient light a surface point would be likely to receive. It simulates a huge dome light surrounding the entire scene. If a a surface point is under a foot or table, it will end up much darker than the top of someone's head or the tabletop. This can then be multiplied by various other surface attributes to achieve a subtle, but very powerful, lighting effect. mdc (lots of info on this over on xsi-base)

I would love to know more.... where is the info avaiable? Thanx!

Attached Link: http://www-viz.tamu.edu/students/bmoyer/617/ambocc/

http://www.xsibase.com/science/rendering.php?detail=306 is a link to xsibase but check out the link first for the same article from Bob Moyer.

Thanx!