The rendered mode in Rhino 7 has a very nice ambient occlusion.
However, when you apply a metal material to any object, that goes away.
How do you create a metal material that still has ambient occlusion?
Hello - I guess a raytraced viewport gets you the expected result?
-Pascal
Yes, sorry… to clarify, this is with the “rendered” realtime viewport.
Also, I just noticed that the same goes for any material with more than 40% transparency…
Yeah, I understood - as far as I know there is no way to make this woirk better currently in the ‘cheap’ openGL rendered mode, only raytraced.
-Pascal
Could I request an explicit option for it in the “custom” material settings?
I think ambient occlusion is a post process effect so somewhere along the line, a flag is added to a stencil buffer or something similar to mark an object for inclusion or not.
A mirror does not have any AO because it reflects everything.
if you apply default metal material, its reflective polish is 100%
in this case the metal behave just like mirror, so no AO can be seen.
here I set the polish to 0%:
as you can see this material no longer resembles metal. AO can be seen.
this is polish = 70%
you can feel both metal material and AO effects.
Is the last example from the “rendered” viewport? If so, what settings did you use?
Default rendering
Default metal but polish 75%
Ah, you’re right, but it’s very, very faint:
However, my wish still remains:
I use the AO of the rendered viewport as a diagnostic check because shapes become much more readable with it, and a custom material should mean just that: Let the user customize it!
So please give me the option of complete control of the AO strength in a custom material, regardless of metal setting, glossiness or transparency!
(Also, would be nice to be able to boost AO above 1 like you can in Blender, to get really strong shadows.)
I think rhino consider some basic lighting rules such as whole polish reflective materials do not have ao effects.
AO is some low cost way to mimic raytracing.its basic is physics rule.
Your demand is against physics rule and consider ao a mere post effect, but it is not.
I once had your kind of demand and I used photoshop, solved in seconds
Artists always cheat and exaggerate to get the best results, even with PBR rendering.
I specifically mention the rendered viewport because it’s realtime, so Photoshop doesn’t work here.
Again, these options already exist but they’re hidden and hardcoded. All I’m asking is for them to be exposed in the “custom material” where you should be able to do anything you want.
I think it kind of make sense…I can understand your demand.
I also agree that the AO factor is hard coded in the system, the factor may be (1-polish) as simple as I can imagine.
You can raise an issure on mcneel jetbrain and see if anyone else has the same demand.