Darker ambient occlusion shadows. Posible?

Is it posible to have darker shadows when ambient occlusion is checked?
In other softwares like Cinema 4D or Maya you can modify the amount of shadow ambient occlusion generates, can Blender do the same? I didn’t see any option for it and the ambient occlusion Factor only makes the scene lighter or darker, I want it to stay the same but have darker shadows.

Hey cucumihai

I only know the Ambient Occlusion in Cycles and it seems, that there aren’t that many options to tweak the shadows.
But I think that you could try to play with the Distance Value a bit. The lower the distance the more dense the shadows should become which could lead to darker shadows if I am not mistaken.
Hope it helps. :wink:

in cycles it only lightens the image. you should turn it on, set it to 0 (set the distance as you please) enable the pass in renderlayer and then composite

If you want the pass without AO affecting the beauty pass or any other layers, you can just enable the pass and leave the world option disabled. This will still enable global AO, the results just won’t be written to anything except the AO pass.

Is not exactly the effect I was going for but thanks for the tips.
I also use Blender internal render because cycles is just toooo slow and it might be ok for renders but not for animations.

In Blender Internal use the Approximate mode for AO instead of Raytrace it makes the shadows a little bit darker. For full control simply output the AO as a pass and composite it back into the final with a curves node following it. Then you can crank up the brightness/contrast as you see fit by tweaking the curves node.

Attachments


27_BI_darker_AO.blend (87.5 KB)

You could also darken the image, and the use the shadow pass as the factor, thus only darkening the area of the shadow.