Ambient Occlusion

What is Ambient Occlusion????

Ambient Occlusion is a 3D shader technique that creates realism into your model.
In other words, it makes your model/scene look  more REALISTIC.

Ambient occlusion is a type of global illumination technique that creates soft shadows on objects especially in the corners. It calculates the light and its relationship with an object based on the distance. This is the reason why scenes have a more realistic look with ambient occlusion (hence the term ambient light meaning normal lighting). It depicts the way light reflects off of an object

Here is an example of ambient occlusion in Maya



In the photo above you can see the necessary shadows and highlights which give the image a more REALISTIC look. There are soft shadows in the corners of the room as well as on the inside corners of the shelf. Overall, the image has depth and realism.

Here is another image to further show the difference between an average picture without ambient occlusion (left) and a picture with ambient occlusion (right). The image with AO is just simple and plain. Also, there are no shadows between the telephone and the wall and on the corner of the wall which makes the image look fake. In the other image there is indeed a soft shadow in the corner of the wall and between the telephone and the wall




Here is my own model that I have done on Maya.

The image on the left features a simple scene without ambient occlusion.



The next image shows the scene in Maya in rendering mode using ambient occlusion. The wonderful thing about Maya is that it gives you its own texture which will be helpful when making games.

If you want to try making your own ambient occlusion scene in Maya you can take a  look at this video.

http://vimeo.com/16288491

Who uses AO???

Well this is a simple answer--- video games. Video games such as Gears of War 2, Batman: Arkham City, and Halo: Reach are just a few examples of video games that use ambient occlusion. So if you were wondering how do they make there games look so real, well here is one of the answers. Ambient Occlusion makes your games look REAL. 

However, games are not the ones who use ambient occlusion. Many traces of ambient occlusion can be seen in movies as well. The image below is a picture of  the innocent robot WALL-E from the Pixar movie WALL-E. He looks just like any ordinary rendered Maya scene. Pretty cool huh.