I’m trying to get a pass that looks like this:
But blender keeps giving me stuff like this:
It seems the actual lighting of the scene is being included in the AO pass.
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I have the same issue if you find a way to resolve this could you reply ahah idk
This is weird.
If I turn on AO in the light tab of the passes, I’ll get a regular AO pass.
I just tried in Blender 3.5 and 3.6.
Weird indeed, how do you export the AO pass ?
I just tried in 3.5.1
If I block the window the AO pass is pure black.
A cube with solidify. Cut some windows into it. Block the windows with some more cubes. Nishita Sky Texture. This is the AO pass in the viewport. Final Render AO pass is the same.
You are right, I was wrong and tested a scene with an outside scenario, not inside a building.
Now I get the same nonsense.
Thank you.
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Change the AO distance under Fast GI approximation to something lower:
AO distance 25
AO distance 5
As far as I can tell, this is the only way to access the AO distance, even if the fast GI approximation is turned off.
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Thanks. 1 more question I’ve had forever but never got an answer to. If you want to use various passes, they are all noisy and only the combined pass is denoised. Does that mean one should run each pass through the denoiser before saving it or should one increase the render settings to get a noise/firefly free result in all passes?
I’ll give you the universal answer: It depends.
If you are trying to export a bunch of passes and denoising them individually is a pain, then it might make more sense to just crank up the samples. If there’s just a few passes you want, then it might be worth it.
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Is there really no way to render only the ambient occlussion without using an override material?
You could do it the manual way, replacing every material with an AO node. Then, the regular render will give you an occlusion pass. This takes more time to setup, but will give you the most control.
Blender is not setup to easily render AO, as it’s considered a rather old and obsolete technique.
But it’s so helpful for doing certain things quickly or with a stylized look.
Surprisingly the AO pass came out extremely perfectly clean even though the other passes are super noisy. It looks much more detailed than denoising the render using the AO node in an override material.
I can actually see AO details in the floor tile and the rough wooden beams in the roof.
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Yeah, I could see it being useful for certain styles of cartoonish shading.
I personally like to use it as part of materials, for dirt and worn edges. The AO node is really powerful in materials, you can finely control its distance for each individual material, use it with a color ramp to control the falloff or even texture its distance.
It would for sure be nice to have a better way to get it in the main render. Sadly, you have to do it the tedious way as far as I’m aware.
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I tend to jump back and forth between different blender versions. I’m always revisiting old practice projects. Every time i encounter an AO shader node it’s a 5 to 15 minute wait as it loads render kernels. I never use that node anymore because of that.
I have never seen any loading for AO, maybe it’s an Optix thing (I’m on Cuda)? I see why you would hesitate to use it.
In 3D rendering programs like Blender or Maya, you can generate a standard Ambient Occlusion (AO) pass by producing your image or animation after turning on the AO render pass in the render settings or by using AO shaders and materials in your scene.