Read Ambient Occlusion in material

[Somian]

Hi,

Is it possible to use ambient occlusion as a material input? let's say I have a rusty metal material, I want the edges (where water collects) to be more rusted, so I would use an inverted AO map as a mask for the rust/metal.

I'm working around this by baking the AO into a texture first and then using this texture as an input, but it gets quite tedious in complex projects as I need to keep re-baking stuff every time it changes.

Thanks!

 

[frank beckmann]

Check out the PBR-shader:

Cheers
Frank

 

[Somian]

Hm... that's an AO map that I can provide to the shader. What I'm looking for is something with a AO output from a node.

So I want the get black when the AO is high and white when it's low and is it as an input for a shader.

EDIT: here's an example of where I've been using that.

I want the lava to be less intense near other objects to make it look like it cools down a little near the wall and columns.

I attached an image of the lava shading network as well as renders to compare the results with and without the AO map. I baked an AO texture that I'm using for a multiplier of the Lava intensity. Other than that, the shader is procedural. Instead of the image I would like to use some kind of AO node, because every time I change something in the scene close to the lava, I need to re-bake the texture.

 

[frank beckmann]

Seems I don´t understand exactly what you´re loking for - other than baking to AO then with different (very short) Max ray length for instance.

Cheers
Frank

 

[Somian]

I'm looking for something like the "directional" node, but instead of the surface normals, I want to get the AO.