Hair Ambient Occlusion

Cyber Radiance

This is a simple scene that shows how the Hair Ambient Occlusion feature of the Hair Farm Renderer works.

This scene includes two light sources: a spot light with Hair Shadow Maps and a point light. The point light is set as "Ambient Only" and the Hair Ambient Occlusion feature only affects the illumination due to this point light. Instead of this point light source, it is possible to merely add some global Ambient from the Environment and Effects window. We use a point light as the ambient light source here, that allows choosing which objects are affected by the ambient light using the Exclude feature of the point light.

The hair model does not have a material assigned, so it is using the default hair material. Hair materials of Hair Farm (including the default material) support the Hair Ambient Occlusion feature. Other materials of 3ds Max, however, do not have implicit support for Hair Ambient Occlusion. Therefore, we add the Hair Ambient Occlusion Map of Hair Farm to the Ambient Map slot of the material.

In this scene the renderer is the Scanline Renderer of 3ds Max, though any other renderer can be used, as long as it supports 3ds Max plugins.

You can also use a skylight instead of the "ambient" point light. If you use the Scanline Renderer you should select an advanced lighting plugin, such as Light Tracer or Radiosity. If you use the Scanline Renderer without an advanced lighting plugin, skylight does not work as an ambient light. In that case you can get around this problem by adding a Hair Ambient Occlusion map to the diffuse color channels of all materials (including the hair materials).