Reverse AO - Highlight baking?

Support Materials and Textures
#1

The following definition of AO is oversimplified for purposes of my question.

Ambient occlusion finds crevices and creates dark areas.

Is there a method for finding peaks, so to speak, and depositing dark areas?

The reason I’m asking is this: It’s a very common technique to lighten edge areas on metal object textures to achieve a quick worn look. By applying a “Reverse AO Map” in negative (white areas instead of dark), using multiply blending, I believe this could be faked quickly. A quick trip to Photoshop to make the edge highlights imperfect would complete the illusion.Or perhaps noise could be specified in Blender itself.

I’m essentially asking for a highlight baking system - Low areas darkened by AO, high areas lightened.

Thoughts?

#2

I don’t know…I’m sure this could be scripted at any rate. Useful I think.

#3

Under ‘Layers’ in the Render tab you can enable an AO pass, which will let you manipulate it separately in the compositor. Then you could just use an ‘Invert’ node (under ‘Color’) and a ‘Mix’. Hope that helped.

#4

Thanks. I will give it a shot. I have to admit I’m dreadful with nodes…I’m mostly a game props maker…