We need to create a new environment variable. Click on advanced system settings and then click environment variables. One way to get there is to right click on the computer icon in my case labeled this PC and then go to its properties. We also need to create a Windows environment variable. Now we've saved into the program files directory. You may need to click trough a prompt or even provide a password. It'll be on your system drive, program files, Autodesk, 3ds Max version number, plugins. Go inside there and there is a plugin DLL file, AO light filter dot DLL. Inside there is a descriptive folder, ambient occlusion light filter for Arnold 5.
In the exercise files I provided for this weekly series, I've created a custom folder called plugins. We need to install the light filter in the program file directory, so let's go to Windows Explorer. Mike Farnsworth at Solid Angle kindly developed this light filter for Arnold 5 and Mads Drischler complied it for MAXtoA, so thank you Mike and thank you Mads. This technique relies on an ambient occlusion light filter for Arnold which is not part of the standard MAXtoA installation. Disabling diffuse bounces and using ambient occlusion makes the image less realistic, but it renders an order of magnitude more quickly. I was able to use the default value for diffuse samples which is only two, so the trade off is clear. Again, this doesn't look as realistic, but it rendered in five minutes instead of 40. Now again, take a look at the same scene rendered with no diffuse rays and the scene wide ambient occlusion effect. I had to decrease the diffuse sampling up to six to get this level of quality, which resulted in a render time of over 40 minutes. Now here's an image that was rendered with two diffuse rays or two bounces. If you're rendering high resolution images or animation, you may not want to wait for many hours to render a single frame. The rendering is not as realistic as global illumination, but it's much faster.
The result is darker shading in the corners of rooms, the crevices in and between objects and anywhere the ambient light would be blocked. A flat even wash of illumination is added to the scene and the distance between surfaces determines how much of that ambient light is blocked or occluded. This is actually the original use case for ambient occlusion way back in the 90s. So I'll switch bath and forth between those two images a few times so you can see the difference. Here's the image rendered without the light filter and here it is with the light filter applied. This week I'll build on that technique by adding an ambient occlusion light filter. That movie was titled Approximating Global Illumination in Arnold. Instead I used an Arnold sky dome to provide an even, ambient light.
Previously in this weekly series, I demonstrated how to save render time by disabling global illumination diffuse rays in the Arnold renderer.
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