Maya - Rendering Alpha planes with Ambient Occlusion and fog
polycounter lvl 10
It's me again, need more tech assistance on rendering.
Usually a piece of geo with an AO render pass in Maya works well, but as soon as an alpha gets insterted into the scene, things get tricky. And tricked is where I'm at.
As you can see on the bottom render, there are many intersecting lines where the plane meets the ground geo, which is horrendous is left like that. Above is a small section of how the geo is arranged.
This render does not have an AO pass yet assigned, as lots still needs to be done and I'm still doing lighting. Fog is a massive problem as well, because any 2D or 3D fog that intersects an alpha leaves a nice ghost silhouette of the plane. A Transmat material for fog would be kickass as it would get me what I want, but alas, I can't get it to work for the life of me. So, if any of you know how to use fog in this situation, please do tell.
Back to the grass, what I tried was taking a (Mental Ray) mib_amb_occ material and plugging it into the color channel of each material, in the hope that it would work like it should. Unfortunatly, it only self-AO's, and the rectangle alphas project AO in a rectangle shape, not for each blade of grass as it should which gives weird lines and just doesn't look right.
So there are my two problems. I've got 3 weeks to crack down and finish this project, so help would be super appreciated right now. Thanks folks!
Usually a piece of geo with an AO render pass in Maya works well, but as soon as an alpha gets insterted into the scene, things get tricky. And tricked is where I'm at.
As you can see on the bottom render, there are many intersecting lines where the plane meets the ground geo, which is horrendous is left like that. Above is a small section of how the geo is arranged.
This render does not have an AO pass yet assigned, as lots still needs to be done and I'm still doing lighting. Fog is a massive problem as well, because any 2D or 3D fog that intersects an alpha leaves a nice ghost silhouette of the plane. A Transmat material for fog would be kickass as it would get me what I want, but alas, I can't get it to work for the life of me. So, if any of you know how to use fog in this situation, please do tell.
Back to the grass, what I tried was taking a (Mental Ray) mib_amb_occ material and plugging it into the color channel of each material, in the hope that it would work like it should. Unfortunatly, it only self-AO's, and the rectangle alphas project AO in a rectangle shape, not for each blade of grass as it should which gives weird lines and just doesn't look right.
So there are my two problems. I've got 3 weeks to crack down and finish this project, so help would be super appreciated right now. Thanks folks!