How to apply Ambient Occlusion Texture of a Material in V-Ray for Sketchup 4

[ronen_schmitz]

Hi there,

I know I'll get some eye-rolling, now, however I haven found an answer anywhere. If someone would be willing to help here, it would be highly appreciated.

I use a lot of PBR materials from textures.com, that ship with an AO ambient occlusion texture. How do I apply it in V-Ray 4 for Sketchup?
I know, there is no slot for it, and I may need to use an ExtraTexutre, but I really don't get it, how to apply it in a most standard way.


Thanks so much in advance!
Ronen

[damaggio]

Usually we ditch this AO texture so is one less map to load into memory and use VrayDirt instead, that map is used in Video games, still if you want to use it just multiply on top of the diffuse map.

[nikoleta.garkova]

Hi ronen_schmitz,

As damaggio has mentioned, the AO texture is mostly used in game engines to simulate self-occlusion; this is not required within V-Ray.
Further explanation on possible ways to use it can be found in the following forum post.

[ronen_schmitz]

Dear Nikoleta,
Dear damaggio,

thank you both so much for your replies and explanations. This is highly appreciated.

I will have a look into the various hints.
Please do not close this post just yet as I may have some follow-up questions.

Thanks again!
Ronen

[ronen_schmitz]

nikoleta.garkova damaggio
Dear Nikoletta and dear Damaggio,

so in my VRayPBR material I could, I could either put an AO map as bitmap or a Dirt from the Dropdown into the Opacity channel?
(see attached screenshot).

If I'm wrong, could one of you be so kind and provide me with a screenshot or, two, where to put either Dirt from the dropdown and alternatively an AO map into a PBR material?
Thank you so much,
Ronen

[damaggio]

No , AO is not for bump or opacity, make sure you understand what AO means, you need to layer that on top of the Color slot or use VrayDirt as your Color and skip the AO map.

[ronen_schmitz]

damaggio

"layer that on top of the Color slot"?
So in the PBR material I go "Add Layer/ VRay Mtl"? (Or something else here?) And make sure the Vray Mtl is on top of VRay PBR?

Or, inside VRay PBR, into Color, and then Color Gain (or something else) for the AO map?

Or:
If I use Vray Dirt instead of Color, where does the color than actually come from (since it's not in Vray Dirt)?

[damaggio]

It’s all well explained in the documentation, yes you can use color gain as well or vray dirt .the color gain is maybe the easiest but it will be more difficult to adjust the AO map than using Vraydirt that has more options for fine tuning.