Week 16 - Autodesk Maya - Material ID and Ambient Occlusion

 Week 16 - Autodesk Maya - Material ID and Ambient Occlusion

This week in Maya, I created a Material ID and an Ambient Occlusion map for my sofa. 

Material ID

A Material ID is an RGB texture that acts as a mask so that Quixel Mixer can differentiate different colour values into individual masks. It's essentially just colour identification. You can use it to apply more than one material to a single object.

You can create a Material ID in one of two ways:

• Using Photoshop to manually colour each part separately
• Going into Rendering mode instead of Modelling mode and then following Lighting/Shading>Transfer Maps>Diffuse. 

This is what a Material ID looks like when applied to an object:

And this is what the Material ID map looks like:

I had no issues when created my Material ID, it went well and produced exactly what I wanted. I thought it was quite easy to do, and I could do it again without any instruction on an object that I've already UV Unwrapped and created a Normal Map for.

Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion is a rendering technique that allows shadows in specific areas to be shown. It decides how much exposure there is and where.

This is what a rendered version of an Ambient Occlusion material looks like: 

I had a huge issue with rendering the ambient occlusion as an EXR file in that no rendering would take place no matter what I tried. This issue was eventually solved by copying and pasting the geometry into a new Maya project and re-attempting the render. Once I got past the initial issue, it was quite simple to do. I spent a little bit of time adjusting the samples to get the optimal amount of shadowing on the sofa, but once I got it to where I liked it, the rendering didn't take long at all.

Overall, I think it was all quite simple once any issues were gotten out of the way.