Ambient Occlusion

I currently have the first 1200 frames rendering, these are to be rendered with Physical Sun and Sky and Final Gather. In addition once i am happy with the final renders an ambient occlusion pass will be added to improve the look of the scenes.

I will be using Maya's ambient occlusion pass that allows for just the ambient occlusions to be rendered without having to re-render the whole animation again. This is achieved by selecting all the objects you want to have ambient occlusion on and adding them to a render layer, right clicking this layer and selecting attributes allows for an AO preset to be added. I initially had problems due to the HDR image that is wrapped around a sphere on the perimeters of the scene blocking the AO rays - resulting in a black scene. Taking the HDR image out of the render layer solves this, i have also removed the fur from the layer as this was coming out way too dark due to the way ambient occlusion works. AO doesn't take into account any lights and instead judges shadows based on the distance of objects. It will fire rays and the closer the object to a surface the more that will be bounced back resulting in a lighter colour, meaning less shadow. This was the result on the fur which is close to the body of the bird, the AO just created a lot of dark shadows and ruined the fur.

Here is a test image, the settings used here will be used for creating the final film.