I am aiming for some edge highlighting on this model. I have tried 3 methods, creases, pointiness and ambient occlusion mixed with an emission shader. I’ve messed around with the color ramp, swapped the mix shader round etc, nothing seems to work. I’ve had ambient occlusion work great on the default cube before. It has been applied to other objects (this materail) with the same issue. Which tactic would you choose?
Try an edge split modifier.
AO should work well. Set it to inside, mix it with a noise and you should get an irregular edge wear mask
AO can work on a model like this, but you will have to adjust the distance on the AO node. The default of 1 works well on a cube, but your model seems thin, so it will look better with a lower AO distance.
I failed to read your post carefully enough, here is an example of my method for edge wear:
edge_wear_2.blend (910.4 KB)
It seems Ambient Occlusion isn’t showing in the viewport whereas it did before on the default cube, is this to be expected?
AO does show for me. Maybe you have settings that make it hard to see? If its distance is not well adjusted for the object of the color ramp has the wrong range, it could be hard to see the effect.
I have an example of where I am at here:
Just as I thought, it’s the distance value that needed to be adjusted to the scale of the detail.
I had to reduce it a lot. Also, I used the “inside” setting to get the peaks, it would find the cracks otherwise. I also had to invert the color ramp to get the emissive material where the AO is and not the opposite.
