Blender internal: limiting ambient occlusion

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Hi!

This might be a stupid question, but how can I limit the amount of light objects receive from ambient occlusion? I really like the shadows it’s producing, but everything is kind of lit up too evenly in my scene because of AO. I tried playing with the AO slider but that didn’t produce good results; I would like to have more specific control in which I reduce the amount of light in certain areas only. I also tried negative lamps, but even they didn’t seem to make my objects darker (the shadows started looking strange though).

Is the correct way to create some invisible walls in order to somehow block AO light? If that’s the correct way, what settings should I use to block AO light but not show the wall in a render?

Or is there a better way?

2

World -> Ambient Occlusion -> Factor
Try lower the factor

3

Thanks I meant that when I said I was playing with the AO slider (sorry for using the incorrect term).

I would like to keep my AO shadows strong so the slider doesn’t work really in this case.

Are there any other ways? Would building walls that block the world help?

4

Try the Multiply mode instead of Add.

Approximate mode seems to make darker shadows compared to Raytrace.

Turn your other scene lighting off or down.