Digital Art Zone

Does anyone have some advice for a decent setting for ambient occlusion?  No matter what settings I try, I always seem to end up with these strange dark splotches on stuff (mainly on figures like V4).  If I start adjusting things to make those go away, I start getting a halo effect where two objects meet, which isn’t bad for stuff in the background, but it ruins the image on close-up stuff.

I can’t seem to find a happy medium.  I’ve tried using AO on just the light and on the object surface, but I get the same results.

I’ve not used AO in Poser, but it sounds rather like a setting related to number of samples. What a re your render settings?

Richard Haseltine - 19 September 2012 03:59 PM

I’ve not used AO in Poser, but it sounds rather like a setting related to number of samples. What a re your render settings?

Well, mostly I was just curious what settings other people use.

However, on this particular scene I’m doing that prompted my post, I think I solved the problem I was getting.  For some reason, one of the figures I was using in the scene was causing strange shadow artifacts on the main figure. If I hid that particular figure, the splotches went away.  That figure also had reflection added to it, and that was ultimately the problem.  I turned on the figure, turned off the reflection, and it rendered without the strange shadows. 

The thing is, these two figures aren’t even close to each other in the scene, so there shouldn’t have been any sort of shadow interaction between them.  This figure also uses geometry switching, so I don’t know if that had something to do with it as well.  So, you got me as to what sort of strange interactions were going to cause the problem.

Tutorial
http://www.rdnarenderstudio.com/tutorials/aoeditor/rspao.html

And I can’t find the thread at RDNA at the moment, but there was something about SR3 helping against black spots/blotches with AO used ... do you have it installed?

Kerya - 20 September 2012 12:39 AM

Tutorial
http://www.rdnarenderstudio.com/tutorials/aoeditor/rspao.html

And I can’t find the thread at RDNA at the moment, but there was something about SR3 helping against black spots/blotches with AO used ... do you have it installed?

Thanks for that link.  I don’t have that script, but it does give some useful information I wasn’t aware of.

No, I don’t have SR3 installed yet, but I will definitely do that as soon as possible.  I had planned on doing that for the single axis scaling, but then just forgot to do it.  Thanks.

If you are using IDL you shouldn’t need AO…

EDIT:  Here is a tutorial on it, with Steve Cooper’s blessing below…

http://www.runtimedna.com/forum/showthread.php?46536-Outdoor-Lighting-with-Poser-8-IDL&p=470058