new vray ambient occlusion script

[plastic_]

yeah, the first version came out before the dirtmap, using the dome light, etc.
i extended it with dirtmap functionality now.
besides, the work flow of putting a light material with dirtmap shader into the material override slot isn't very intuitive.
there are many people who like my scripts because they are really simple.

for example my stupid old neon script for viz radiosity was hugely popular (and still is), although it basically does nothing but rearranging a not so intuitive max interface.

that's also the reason why i call my scripts "plugins", because most people don't understand what "scripts" are.
and i spent a lot of time writing a really simple script installer.
i like my stuff being accessible.

[ene.xis]

and me being a perfect stupid thank for them!

seriosly morbid in principle nearly every single script is doable otherwise, BUT in order to improve workflow productivity and longer cofee breaks we greatly apreciate these tools!And those who spend time creating them and share those should be congratulated!


again Tnhak you Plastic!

[Morbid Angel]

yeah no worries, just asking

[Robert]

looks nice, only I would add a few extras:

- exclude transparent objects (you need that for glas and stuff) could also be an exclude layer thing.
- Falloff for dirt map (sorry but I use this most times)

Oh, and occlution and dirt map is not really compareable. Just create an material overwrite for mentalray and see the difference. Dirt map is much better, but has some problems with smoothed surfaces (steps).

[plastic_]

looks nice, only I would add a few extras:
- exclude transparent objects (you need that for glas and stuff) could also be an exclude layer thing.

this is definitely coming. i only have to think about how to do it...might be tricky. i cant just exclude objects from rendering, because the glass may be a submaterial in a window object, for example.

looks nice, only I would add a few extras:
- Falloff for dirt map (sorry but I use this most times)

i didn't include this, and other dirtmap options, because i'm not sure if it's really useful (and i want to keep the interface as simple as possible).
could you explain why you use it, as opposed to a different radius?

[Robert]

Well the fallof helps to makes everything smoother. So, in animation for example some dirt parts come up to flicker a little. Or, some times you simple get problems with small dirty linies and antialiasing. Of course you can increase antialiasing of you have time to render.
Also, falloff takes away the amount of dirt, so small areas vanish, while larger ones get more smooth. I think this is a very important feature!
More information you get in the help manual.

About the transparent thing. Well, indeed if you set an object to 100% transparent it won't be affected by dirt anymore. So, possible you set the opacity for these materials to 0%. You can also replace these materials by a mate material that can be excluded from alpha, some people might want this.

The basic problem is, that people use multisubmaterials and some of these could contain transparent materials. So, you can't simple select object groups, you need to go for the materials.

[dlparisi]

With apologies and kudos to Marc , I've been messing around with the script to tweak it with things that I personally found useful. I was having trouble with the vraylight mtl he used generating black faces on any inverted normals so I included the option of using a self-illuninated standard material (it's a little slower so I left in the option to use the vray mtl). I also added settings for alternate image samplers, falloff and to change the environment on the fly.



I've learned a lot from analysing marc's script about rollouts and general maxscript stuff and I'm sure what I've done would have taken him about 10 minutes where it took me several hours to figure everything out ("==" means equal to ). It's his script so I'll just post a screenshot of some of the changes I've made and leave it up to him if he wants to update his script. Marc: if you're interested I can email you my updated script but I don't thing you'd need it. Thanks.

[plastic_]

I've learned a lot from analysing marc's script about rollouts and general maxscript stuff and I'm sure what I've done would have taken him about 10 minutes where it took me several hours to figure everything out ("==" means equal to ).

that's cool, but you probably shouldn't learn to much from my code, because it can get really ugly and dirty sometimes
like, my semi-wizard generated rollout in this script is a total mess.
or the try() catch() stuff.
personally i learned a lot from the blur script library, and Borislav Petrov´s scripts, he works for autodesk, wrote the maxscript helpfile and generally cares a lot about clean and nice code.
which can get important for more complex scripts.
for your changes, i'll consider adding a falloff option. i will try to recreate the normals problem with the lightmaterial, but my first priority is to keep things as simple and clean as possible.
i find additional AA settings unnecessary, because with my tests QMC with 0.001 threshold always wins in this situation.

[dlparisi]

i find additional AA settings unnecessary, because with my tests QMC with 0.001 threshold always wins in this situation.

Yeah, best for quality but not for time. It's probably not necessary but I had fun adding it anyways.

[jujubee]

It's a cool plugin/script. I just ran a quick test with two default max teapots/max materials right out of viewport. Nothing else. The render was rather painfully slow. I then reduced subdivisions and more or less the same thing. 3+ minutes. These teapots now say 26 mins with skylight enabled.

Is there any way you can optimize (or change) the render settings with a rollout so that it's faster? The optimized rQMC settings seems to be killing times drastically.

[plastic_]

the thing with the QMC is...
based on the assumption that you always want clean AA edges, i find that a noise threshold of 0.001 _always_ gives the fastest results based on the dirtmap subdivs.
for example, with 4 subdivs, 0.001 is as fast as 0.1 and you get clean edges and better noise distribution, than comparable speed with adaptive AA...
the noise threshold adjusts to the overall noise (subdivs) in a very clever way...so i thought it would be better to control overall noise/quality with the subdivs only and let the QMC sampler handle the rest.
i also think, using smoothing algos, as lightcache, adaptive, etc, would defeat the idea of a sexy brute force ambient occlusion output...there's something about the honest minimalistic pixel noise i'm missing with smooth GI...
it's also important to notice that dirtmap is no GI! you can render closed rooms with the dirtmap, where GI would be black. so i can't use lightcache with dirtmap occlusion.
but i will surely test options and other ways...especially if i'm proved wrong on something.
thanks for all the input!

[DF02]

Great tools! One question, how do I render animation using ambient occlusion? I need my scene to be rendered in 'ambient occlusion mode' ... ?

[plastic_]

well, just select the right settings in the render dialog, range + file output, etc, then don't press the max render button, but the script´s.

[DF02]

ah, beautiful!! ... thank you very much ... i'll try that.

[rmejia]

I love it ! Thank You !