Day 81

Next up is a lesson in ambient occlusion. The idea is that places where two surfaces meet tend to receive less light and be darker like where two couch cushions meet. Above is the starting scene which looks pretty good. However some shadows are missing because there are only a few lights lighting the scene. Instead of adding more lights and potentially complicating the scene, you can do a separate render for occlusal shadows which is independent of the lighting in the scene.

Here is the result of that rendering and you can see where shadows would be under general uniform lighting. Then I can use that and combine it with the first image to produce a more realistic look. I combined it using Photoshop so I'm not sure how it would work for an animation instead of a still image.