I was playing around with Blender, made a model, and then rendered it. It looked terrible because it didn't have enough lighting, so, I turned on Ambient Occlusion, most of you might not know about ambient occlusion, if you do, you know always to turn it on. Ambient Occlusion (AO) creates softer shadows, brightens everything (not your lamps, but brightens the world), and adds a soft touch of controlled noise (of course you can turn noise off, but soft and controlled noise always makes my renders better ). I will show you versus AO on and off. You should only use AO for daytime scenes!

AO on and no lamp:



AO off and no lamp:



AO on with lamp:



AO off with lamp:



As you can see, AO is much better. So HOW DO I TURN AO ON? That's simple, go to the shadings buttons (F5), and then the world buttons, and hit "Ambient Occlusion.



Suddenly, a panel of buttons will appear. We will go over some of these. But first, lets actually get to the tutorial
Open up a new Blender and keep the default cube. Press SHIFT+C, all this does is center the cursor, so it's right below the plane, and view everything, like the HOME button. Now add a plane (SPACE>ADD>MESH>PLANE) and scale it up beyond the camera's view. Your scene should look like this:

Now in edit mode with the cube, select all the vertices with "A" and press "W" on your keyboard, and select "Bevel". Set "recursion" to 3.

Now in editing buttons, press "Set Smooth". Add some materials. Now in the AO panel, because I am lazy,this isn't a manual, and because if you hover your mouse over a button in blender, it tells you what it does, I will only explain a the confusing buttons. AO is just like any other lamp, so since lamps can use textures, so can AO. Make a texture for the world by going into the textures, clicking world, and adding a texture. The texture won't show up in the world unless you press "Hori" in the Map To tab in the world buttons. Now press "Sky Texture" in the AO panel, and now the AO will use the sky texture you made before. To change the color AO will use, click "Sky Color". This will use the Zenith color of the world, and you might not know where the zenith is. It's located here:


Change the colors a bit, and render. This will change the hue of the world, like if you would have a green sun, it the world would have a slight touch of green. This will also change the shadow color. "Samples" would be the quality of the shadows, low sample would result in a noisy shadow, more samples would be a smooth shadow.although high sample looks better, it really takes much more time to render, and I prefer medium sampling, adds a bit of noise, and faster render (by the way, if you are wondering why its green and purple in these images is because I turned on color ramps for the cube ).







Well, I think you guys can figure out the rest, because it is clear in the help

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