Technical Paper Ambient Occlusion Maps in Maya

I will use my character to show the example of using this technique, I also applied this to my environment but as they work in the same way I have selected one example. It paints the shadows between the objects to add more realism to the texture. 1. Check that manager Maya to mental ray is plugged in by looking in Windows, Settings/Preferences, Plug in Manager and select the camera and change the background colour to white by changing the options in Attribute Editor, Environment.

Figure 1 Plug in manager 2. Select the Hyper Shade under Windows, Render Editors and then create a Surface Shader and apply it to the object.

Figure 2 Surface Shader

3. Create a Mib amb Occlusion node and set the Samples to 256 and Spread as 8 or 8.5 and then plug it into the surface shader by right clicking the right arrow on the mib amb occlusion node and choose the out value and then left click the surface shader node and select out colour.

Figure 3 mib amb Occlusion settings 4. In render settings set the filter to Lanczos in the Quality setting.

Figure 4 Lanczos filter setting

5. Change to render options and select Lighting/Shading and click the box next to Batch Bake Mental Ray and make sure these options are set.

Figure 5 Bake Mental Ray Settings 6. Make sure it is set to a Tiff and that resolution matches the UV map and then match these options Tick use bake set override Colour Mode Occlusion Occlusion Rays 10 Tick Bake to one map and Bake alpha 7. Click Convert and close and wait several minutes until an ambient occlusion preview has baked to the map and baked out an individual AO map that is saved in Project folder, Render Data, Mental ray, Light Map

Figure 6 Where Ambient Occlusion map is saved in project file 8. Open the AO Map and Colour map for the model in either Photoshop or After Effects and place the AO Map above the colour and select drop box to change the layer to multiply and set the opacity low (at least 30%) then flatten the image and save it out as a new file 9. Take the map back into Maya and create a new Blinn for the model and click the button next to colour and find the new map created and plug that into the model.

Figure 7 Left render - before AO Map Right render AO Map added