Hmm, I don't get it, what errors does this solve? Supersampling gives antialiasing around the edges of floaters, but it doesn't fix the problem where floaters don't cast good AO because they're too far away. I thought EQ had a nice workaround for this.
They guys at Raven talked about using floaters too... http://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/ArtReference_CreatingModels#head-3400c230e92ff7d57424b2a68f6e0ea75dee4afa
just set the max distance in the mentalray AO shader. its set to 0 by default which means occlusion rays will be cast an infinite distance. if you set it to a value lower than the distance between your floaters and the surface the problem is fixed. This way you get to keep the falloff and Spread settings. giving you nice…
I'm not sure i get how you are conceptualizing this. so ill just explain it as i understand it :) for every pixel rendered a cone of rays is shot from its world space position. these rays wont return hits for faces more than the max distance. so faces further than the max distance from the pixel will not cause occlusion…
If I have gross-as-fuck messy shading/meshflow in the interior of an inset area I will frequently put a plane or whatever in the bottom of it to hide that. I've been doing that in a production environment for 3 years and it has been nothing but useful, hope this helps :) Seriously, end result is what matters, not workflow.…