A silly trick to get a darker (more noticeable) ambient occlusion without having to use compositing*.
I only tested this with the Blender Render Engine (“Blender Internal”). Hopefully it also works with Cycles.
In one of your views, change it to the Python Console, write this line and press Enter:
C.scene.world.light_settings.ao_factor = 1.5
The ambient occlusion factor is a slider in the World settings and it only allows a 0.0 ~ 1.0 range. You can put any value you want with that line, like 1.9 etc.
I’m not sure if this works with animation, but at least with a still render it does: the ambient occlusion gets darker.
- To do this in compositing you’d have add an AO pass to your render layer, and then with compositing nodes use a Color -> Mix node to ‘multiply’ the AO pass with the Combined pass to increase the ambient occlusion effect.
Note that you’d also have to turn on the ‘Full Sample’ option of the antialiasing settings to avoid edge artifacts from the ambient occlusion and shadow passes not filling in some semitransparent pixels at the edges of objects. With the trick above you don’t have to use Full Sample so it’s slightly faster.