I finally get it ambient occlusion

Introduction. Bak in the day when i started using Blender, global illumination required some creative work-arounds. The most popular being a Low power, duplicated spot lights parented todo a 1/2 an ico-sphere, for the time, it was a great solution. You could create nice lighting and software overlapping shadows with a very reasonable render time. And best of all, it was something i could set up easily and use efectively. As time went on, coders added a new lighting option, Ambient Occlusion (AO). It created nice Even shadows and added overall lighting, but it was rather Slow and a Little confusing todo set up without a cheat sheet. So Many users (myself included) stuk with the duplicated spot light method, more time passed, and the Ambient Occlusion options were refined and speed up considerably. Which was great, unfortunately for me, it was still rather confusing todo set up unless i had a cheat sheet. And Even with a cheat sheet, y generally didnt get results i liked, so when 2.5 came out i decided todo play with the latest incarnation of Ambient Occlusion. Hoping that somehow it might actually make sense. Oddly enough, Although it still has the same options, the new lay out and grouping makes it sem far less confusing for me. Something i am attributing todo the fact that now i can clearly se just what goes with what, what was once stufed all into one panel, now occupies four sepárate panels. So let take a look at what we now have. This is a simple scene with no lamps added yet. We are first going todo look at each section in separately.

Ambient Occlusion:
Multiply of course is going todo multiply any shadows you already have. Since there are no lamps in this scene, you get a black image.

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Add brings more light into your scene, so Even with no lamps present you get a lighted image.

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Environment lighting.

Environment lighting adds light based on one of thre options, white, Sky color or Sky texture. You can control how much light is added with the energy slider, white adds Even white light Sky color adds Whatever color you Sky is Sky texture adds any textures you might have set for the world in addition todo the skycolor, such as clouds.

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Indirect lighting.

Indirect lighting Will provide the bouncing of light from one object todo another. It does however require that light actually be present. And in our case, no lamps means no bounc-ing of light.

Gather.

The Gather panel gives you two options for generating AO, RayTrace and appróximate, with appróximate of course being much.

Faster. So it is a matter of what you prefer as todo which you use for the Gathering method, having it all Split out like this, made it much easier for me todo se what effect setting changes made on my image, now that it finally makes a Little more sense and is much easier todo se what is doing what, let put it all together.

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Even with no lamps added, you already have the start of some pretty god lighting, of course adding lamps Will add impact and allow you todo highlight or focus attention on certain details of your image, one more added bit of fun, environment lighting can be afected by Sky & Atmosphere settings under the Sun Lamp settings. So go ahead and add a Sun Lamp, position it anywhere you want, scroll down todo the Sky & atmos-phere panel and toggle it on, there are a couple of presets that you can choose from, or you can experiment and come up with your own, in the environment lighting pan-el, set it todo either Sky color or Sky texture and render, since there is now a Lamp in the scene, you may want todo lower.

Your settings in the AO, environment-ment lighting and indirect lighting panels, especially if it sems todo bright, well there you go, doesnt that sem so much easier?
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