Ambient Occluded Kitchen

In class today I quickly showed how to create Ambient Occlusion passes, referring to this tutorial. Building upon that, here is how to use photoshop to composite the passes, giving you more control that simply multiplying them directly in Maya
To the right you see the basic lit black and white kitchen

 

Here is the Ambient Occlusion pass, using the default settings

 

Simply multiplied on top, the way too dark ambient occlusion pass makes the entire image black. Not quite, but close

 

In Photoshop, I brightened the Ambient Occlusion render using curves. This clearly reveals the noisiness (click on the image to see that in a larger picture)

 

So next I apply a smart blur to the image

 

Multiplying the images was still making it to dark, so I added the Ambient Occlusion image to the normal render. Add is called Screen in Photoshop, and I set the Ambient Occlusion layer to 22%

 

Finishing touch: changed the outside color, using the alpha channel that was saved with the tiff images