Blender | Ambient Occlusion Passes | Getting Started

hello guys and welcome to another tutorial so today is kind of an introduction to um amid occlusion passes in blender how to get a setup now this is by no means um like anything everything that could be said about ambient occlusion passes a lot more it could be said i'm just covering the very basics and i'm going to show you how we can enable it and how we can combine this ambient inclusion path to our normal render just to give it a bit more depth and i'm going to show you how to add this multiply node here so you can adjust the amount so let's get into it and i hope you guys have fun okay so first of all obviously you're going to need a scene to work with so go ahead and find something that you like i'm using cycles by the way but this should also work for ev it should be fine and what we're going to be doing is i'm going to be going through the steps of enabling the ambient occlusion pass now we're all familiar with going to our render tab here hitting render image and we get our render but what we can also do in a blender is we can go over here to this thing called the view layer properties if we click on this little tab it's going to give us these options here but the one we're going to be interested in at the moment is going to be our passes and i'm going to open up the passes you're going to see all of these different options here things that can be enabled and essentially all this is is when we do eventually go into our compositing workspace up here it's going to give us a node and by default it's going to give us this image node for just our regular render that we get but if you enable some of these passes here it'll also enable them on that node for you and you can incorporate them in your compositing in this case the one we're going to want to be working with is going to be the ambient occlusion so if you come down here under the light part of the passes you're going to see these five options here or these four options and one we're going to be enabling is ambient occlusion now shadow is very similar um you can also enable that and incorporate it into your to your workflow but this time we're just going to be for this specific video focusing on the ambient occlusion and ambient occlusion it's just like it's the name says it it's just where the ambient lighting and the bounce lighting is occluded and that's usually going to be between really tight spaces and crevices and grooves and stuff and it's just really a good way of adding depth to a scene so once you've enabled it we're going to go to our render button just like usual and you're going to hit render image so i'm going to do that now by the way this will take a little bit longer than usual because it's actually going to be rendering two images so in the background not only is it rendering this but it's going to be rendering that path now if you also enable more passes it's also going to be more time so if i enable the shadow pass it'll be three images it's kind of rendering so let's go render and render image okay so the render is now finished it just took a little bit longer like i would have expected so what we're going to do is once you've rendered that we're going to go over to our compositing workspace so that's going to be up here if you can't see the compositing workspace you can always click on little plus and then go in here and just get the compositing workspace so click on the compositing workspace and if you don't see any nodes here all you have to simply come up here is click on use nodes and you'll see your node now if you don't see your image in the background here as well you need to go shift a you need to go to search and you need to type in viewer click on the viewer place it under the composite here and you take the image which is your your original main render and you're going to plug it in here and you should be able to actually see your image now in the background here if you want to zoom in and out the image you can actually go alt v and that's going to zoom in and v is going to zoom out so alt and then alt b if you want to also move around you can hold in the alt key and hold in your middle mouse wheel click on the image and you can also move around so that could be useful so i'm just going to grab this bar here bring it down gives us a bit more space now essentially the composite here is just obviously the final composite so anything plugged into here is what you're going to get in your final composited render the viewer node is essentially just going to give us the ability to see what's going on in the background here in this compositing workspace so anyway let's get into this over here we can see here we have our image that's just our normal render but because we enabled the ambient occlusion over here we can now also see we have an ambient occlusion path if i actually grab this ambient occlusion pass and i drag it into the viewer here we can see this is what our ambient occlusion pass looks like and that's what we want to mix with this guy here so what we're going to do is we're going to go shift a we're going to search and we're going to get a mix shader we're going to click on this or i shouldn't say shader it's a mixed node so we're going to click on this mix node and then we're going to take our image here so the image from our render layer that's just our normal render i'm going to plug it into the top socket here of this node then we're going to take this one to ambient occlusion and we're going to make sure to plug it into the bottom socket so now we can see we have this um both of them plugged in here and when it comes to this guy over here and we want to go down to multiply so we don't want to be a mix but rather a multiply and now if we take the image here and we plug it into our viewer to have a look at it we're going to see our ambient occlusion is now being multiplied over this image now i don't understand how all the math works but i do know this is how you set it up so what we can do now is come over here to the slider and if it's all the way up to one it's going to be quite dark but if you drag it down a little bit you can see it's not as intense so i like to go with something like almost just a little bit over halfway but this is obviously personal preference and you can mess around with it also make sure to apply it and plug this image into the composite as well so you can actually get it in your final render now i think this looks pretty cool and you can actually compare it by grabbing this image text this original image and just quickly plug it into the viewer node and you can see this is what it looks like before and if we grab this image on the multiply and plug it into the viewer node you can see this is what it looks like after and to me that looks quite cool i really like the look of this and you can also um export these passes individually and then composite them in photoshop or something or if you wanted to but this is just a quick way to do it and if you're going to do animation it's really nice having this all in in one shot now at the moment if you see i put it all the way up to one you can see the sky kind of disappears and there's a reason for that because the way i would usually do this is also do i'd also do an environment pass and a few other passes um to take care of that issue and it'd be a little bit more of an advanced setup but that's not the focus today i'm just getting you guys introduced to how to set up an ambient occlusion pass i hope you guys are able to use this in your workflow um so if this is new to you definitely go try it out give it a shot have some fun and share it on instagram show me what you've made and i'll see you guys later for another tutorial and stay safe

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 41,460

Keywords: Blender layers, Blender Passes, Blender AO, Blender ambient occlusion passes, passes in Blender, Easy Blender tutorials for beginners, easy begginners, Blender for dummies, easy Blender compositor tutorial, blender compositing for beginners, blender compositing vfx

Id: quFOa207syg

Length: 6min 37sec (397 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020