ambient occlusion in Vray for animation?

[luckyluc]

I am making an animation, and I was thinking of using the Ambient occlusion button in Vray.

This works fine when making a still.

 

But does anyone have experience with precalculating light and the combination of ambient occlusion?

 

Hints and examples are very welcome.

[Stephen Thomas]

Lighting doesn't come into it when you're dealing with ambient occlusion, but really I think you would be better doing this as a separate pass. Either use a vray light material with vray dirt map as an override material and render your frames out, or better still if you add the VrayExtraTex render element and assign your Vray Dirt map to that then your ambient occlusion frames will render out at the same time as your animation frames. Having it separated will give you greater flexibility to control the strength of the occlusion by playing with the opacity in post production software.

[luckyluc]

Thank you for your answer.

The problem is that with you suggested method I have to render twice.

 

That makes the ambient occlusion button a little less easy to use.

[WAcky]

Why do you have to render twice???

 

It will render out the extra pass as a seperate file...if you have your render settings correct...

[Nic H]

+1

use render elements

doesnt add much time at all.

[zhopudey]

How do I use AO in vray?

[Nic H]

read the posts above?

[luckyluc]

Thank you for your answers. but what you guys talk about is making an override material or not?

If i make an VrayExtraTex, I can choose dirtmap, and then render it and compose the two in videopost.

 

But I was thinking about using the button in this screenshot.

If I put this button on, can i precalculate this you think?

[WAcky]

Well i guess it's time for you to do some tests. It should be a pretty easy test to carry out I would say. This feature hasn't been out for long so I doubt anyone will have done much testing with it yet.