A friend of mine over at RockBigDave asked me how I created the render for my most recent Stargate model. Told him I would kindly post the technique I use. I don’t think its an uncommon method of rendering or anything, but its always helpful to share with people who don’t know. So, while I wait for a stupid amount of RAW photographs to import here is a guide on how I render my scenes.

First you need to setup your camera in your scene. I would recommend you create a new camera so you don’t need to move it around. Your going to need to do two renders so they need to be the same. I often turn the resolution gate on to help frame the render.

The first render I do is a hardware render. I use the preset “Production Quality” and set my desired resolution. Nothing to fancy here, just hit render. I like hardware renders since it seems to really show off the edges in a render and doesn’t create the softness you seem to get from a software render or a mental ray render. Hardware render below.

Now you want to create a new material that you will apply to everything in your render. First go to your hypershade window and create a basic Lambert material. Then create a mental ray texture called Mib_amb_occlusion. You need to attach this to the Lambert material by middle clicking it on the work area and dragging it onto the Lambert, choose default from the menu that pops up. Now you have created an Ambient Occlusion material and you need to apply it to everything in your scene.

An Ambient Occlusion material really brings out the depth and shadows in your render. You will see what I mean in a moment, first we need to change our render settings to accompany this new material.  Firstly we need to render using mental ray. Change the quality preset to production and then on the features tab turn on Ambient Occlusion. I also render with Caustics enabled and Final gather. However these are personal preference and are not required. Just ambient occlusion will suffice. Make sure your resolution is set and the camera angle is the same as your previous render and then render away.

You can see how the ambient occlusion really brings out the depth and shadows in the model that cannot be seen under the hardware render. Now its time for a little post production. Fire up Photoshop or your program of choice and import both your renders into separate layers. All you simply need to do is put the ambient occlusion render on top of the hardware render and change the blending mode to overlay. You should see a massive improvement in the depth and details of your render.

Its always nice to toggle the ambient occlusion render layer off and on again just to really see the difference it makes. I hope this was helpful. I should image you could apply the same technique to an animation as well.