Creating occlusion effects

One of the big challenges that any artist faces when creating any kind of an interior …render is the capturing of detail that oftentimes only gets highlighted or becomes noticeable …in a render because of shadows in the scene. …Now, rather than shadows created by light sources, what we're referring to here are …really occlusion shadows, that is, a surface darkening that is caused by the close proximity …of one object to another. …This causes the general environment lighting to be somewhat obstructed or occluded, hence …the name ambient occlusion.…

We have of course already seen how difficult or at least time-consuming it can be to try …and pull out small details in the scene using our global illumination engines, …although certainly that is possible, especially if we use the Deterministic Monte Carlo engine. …A somewhat quicker option that is available to us can be found in the Indirect Illumination …rollout of our Options Editor, …so let's go and open that up for ourselves. …If we open the Indirect Illumination rollout, you can see we do have an Ambient Occlusion group.…