I love Ambient Occlusion! It makes even me look like I know what I'm doing when it comes to lighting.

I animated this in v12 then brought it over to 13 for rendering. Render times were quite reasonable comparatively.

This was with 100% global ambience and no lights. Global Color AO, white, 100% ambient, 100% AO. Rendered 16-pass with 30% AO sampling.

The toughest part was creating the fade-in fade-out effect. I thought that animating the camera's Global Ambience from 0 to 100 would do it, but it had no effect, so I wound up animating: 1. the camera background color, 2. the ground plane color, 3. the percentage of the "rifle barrel" decal.

Does the Global Ambience property actually have any effect? Or did I do something wrong?

Funny stuff Zach. Love it!

I mean... ahem... don't play with guns.

I think I read somewhere in the forum where (Yves perhaps) mentioned there was still work being done on Ambiant Occlusion. Might be my imagination though...

Ha, ha! That's funny, Zach!
Were you doing your fades in the compositor?

No, just straight animating, like I mentioned above.

(thanks!)

Very nice idea and execution. Funny too.

LOL. Great animation Zach! Made me smile Thanks

Hey now... it wasn't that graphic!

For the fade-in and fade-out, you could have put a black patch right in front of the camera and animated its transparency.

Haha, lol, that was hilarious! Haha.

Good one zach!!! That's classic stuff there!

The more I see of the new ambient occlusion feature, the more I like it. It would be nice to see how it helps with mixed CG/live-action work.

I can't get enough of it. In fact, I'm thinking about using v13 to re-render The Cell-Phone (which I was going to do anyway) just so I can use AO, since it was basically exactly the look I wanted.

Zach,

Sorry to be such a fan boy on this,
but these are great!
Wow, so much going on, and done so well.

Shaggy is a little too small to really appreciate AO but I appreciate the funny flick.

Camera Ambiance is an oddity and will be removed.

As for the fade-in, fade-out effect, that would be better handled with a Camera post-effect. The "Tint" effect would do it by setting both colors to whatever color you want to fade to and animating the Tint percentage. However, the Camera post-effect are currently broken. There is already an A:M report on that.

Very funny.

Do you have a larger version you can show, it's difficult to appreciate the lighting at this size?

I can make one, as soon as I push this vodcast out the door, anyway.

great way to begin the evening on the forum thanks ....still chuckling

Another funny one, Zach!

I agree Shaggy's a bit small. I think you could frame it somewhat closer without losing the gun barrel effect.

Camera Ambiance will be removed?

Yves, I am still stuck on V11.1i, and have used camera global ambiance at 100% and remove all lights from the scene to get nice, graphic animations...

TELL ME there is now another way of doing this in V12/13 (which I will have soon...)

You should be able to get the same look as with the camera ambiance and even more. But show me an example of what you need (start another thread) so I can answer.

Ask and ye shall receive...

Haha thats funny ,good one Zach

Nice animation

The ending black seemed a little long though.

Sooooooooooooo Brilliant Zach! I'm still laughing! Awesome. :-)

Frank Silas
http://www.franksilas.com

Zach, I love this animation!! Very funny idea and good timing.

Bravo!

Cheers,
David

Very nice, I like the full anim also. What's the source of the music you're using?

Richard

It's an original, sort of. I made it with pre-made loops in Apple Soundtrack.