Cycles ao node
An ao node that would use ao calculation to interactively control material textures.
This allows to quickly setup dirt layer by ao which can even be masked by mapping ao distance with another texture.
An ao node that would use ao calculation to interactively control material textures.
This allows to quickly setup dirt layer by ao which can even be masked by mapping ao distance with another texture.
13 Comments
An AO node (not the AO shader) that works like the Pointiness and be used as color information and mask easily would be great indeed. Maybe located in Input > Geometry and with an Inverted AO option that generates it fro, the backfaces for dirt.
How does this differ from the Ambient Occlusion shader that's already in Blender?
@Jason van Gumster: The only option in the cycles ao shader is color. Here you can control distance in scene units, map/mask the distance using a texture and choose textures for occluded unoccluded areas. On top of that you can choose to exclude other or even specific objects from ao calculations.
@000kitbash: You can adjust AO distance using an RGB curve or color ramp. Occlusions (and their inversion) can be mixed after the AO node.
Everything seems to be already there. It's just handled in a different way.
@Jason van Gumster: So it is possible to use scene units (i.e. 5cm) to determine ao distance and then also use texture mask to create distance variation in that 5cm limit? Sorry if noob question, but I thought that's not possible.
@000kitbash: That's harder to do (requires a bit of math), but not impossible. For me, even when we with the distance units we already have in AO settings (both in Cycles and in BI), I've found that it feels like I have better control of the results by eyeballing it to taste with curves or a ramp.
@Jason van Gumster: I guess I'm gonna have to get used to the ways blender does things then... Sorry if I'm pain in the ass with all them requests :)
@000kitbash: Ain't no thing. As long as we find happy solutions, I don't mind in the least :)
@Jason van Gumster: Um... the AO Node is a Shader Node. You can't apply Color Correction Nodes after a shader node. As far as I know, Brecht already planned to convert it to a Color Node though.
@Simon Storl-Schulke: i was just going to say that
Should this be considered done? Since Lukas made this ao node...?
github.com/lukasstockner/blender/tree/aonode
@000kitbash: Not yet. It's in his personal repository and hasn't been merged into master or any of the branches on the official repo.
For no you still can use OSL to get such AO shader, like that one .