Creating Ambient Occlusion In Autodesk Maya

Ambient occlusion is one of the most important pass while composing your final shot. Ambient Occlusion is a shading technique which helps us to create the contact shade between two objects. Actually it calculate the amount of exposure of an object in ambient lighting.

In Autodesk Maya its very easy to get the ambient occlusion effect. First we have to create a scene where few object should be near to each other. see the video we took few primitive objects. Then select all the objects and put them in a new "render layer". Remember you have to put them in render layer not the visibility layer. 

Next you have to check that mental ray renderer is active from the plugin list. Now right click on the layer and go to the attribute of that render layer. In the attribute editor under the layer tab click on the preset button and select the occlusion from the list. Bingo you get the default and effective ambient occlusion in result just hit the render and see the result.

Now if you want to edit the effect according to your requirement you have to go to the shader which is a surface shader in Autodesk Maya and start playing with maximum distance and spread parameter to change and customize the effect. Increase the samples to get rid of the grains in the render output.