Rendering and Ambient Occlusion

We decided to use the Mental Ray renderer which is included in Maya for rendering our animation. Mental Ray has a lot of features which can be combined to create very real and life-like renders. We decided to give our animation a cartoony feel. We experimented with Final Gather and Global Illumination, but the

se effects not only took away from the cartoon style, but increased render time substantially.

We also considered using an Ambient Occlusion pass in our final animation render. Ambient Occlusion renders subtle shadowing detail to all objects in a scene, and can give images a lot more depth as a result. Three images are shown below which help to illustrate the benefits of Ambient Occlusion.The image above is a raw ambient occlusion render, showing just shadowing details of the scene.


This image shows a defaul render from Mental Ray, without the ambient occlusion pass added.

The final image shows the two combined. A lot more detail is now apparent, adding depth to the image.

In the end though, we decided for a number of reasons that we wouldn't use Ambient Occclusion. For one, it took away from the cartoon-like effect we were trying to get. This would have been enough to stop us using it, but the render time for each frame in AO would have been around 7 minutes, meaning it would have taken about a week of rendering, which was time we didn't have.

It was interesting to experiment with it though, and the results were certainly good.