Hey guys! In this video, I’m going to show you how to make an ambient occlusion pass in Houdini. I’m not going to go over a lot of the finer details but I’m just going to show you how to do this real fast, okay.

So we’ll start from scratch at our object level. First, this is an ambient occlusion I made to show an example of what it looks like. I put this little texture on there and these blocks and this teapot just to show you what an ambient occlusion looks like. And we can go in to how to adjust the ambient occlusion within a later video. This is one is just to show you how to use it.

So, let us lay down to grid, and let’s lay down a teapot; let’s bring it up, let’s scale it up, like so, okay. Now, the first thing we’re going to want to do is hit the tab key, type light and choose the light template, then this will throw us in our light template, okay. You can go in your light template and look and see if you’re in residency in how it’s laid out. But for now, we’re just going to go to our shop network. Now let’s tab, type V E X Global. You see a VEX Global illumination, and we will lay that down.

Okay, so now, let’s go back to out shot network, our object network, select our light. Let’s go to our render tab, shaders, we’re going to have to define our light shader here, so let’s hit our little button and let’s give it the VEX Global illumination that we just laid down.

Sop now, let’s go to render; create a render node, mantra, let’s go to our shop network, make sure everything’s set up. I’m going to take my global tent to 2. Sampling quality is how good and how well it’s going to look. I’ll reduce this to 64 and you’ll see that the speed of the render will be a lot better but it won’t be as sharp. Let’s go to alt, let’s control click the camera and add a camera and let’s go to our mantra node and render and see what we get.

And there we go, there’s our ambient occlusion pass and Houdini, it’s that easy guys, no problem. If you want to add, let’s go back to out shop network—let’s go to our materials palette and let’s add a simple displace like this. Let’s pick our simple displace, let’s use a displacement map and let’s pick, let’s see here, what can we pick? What looks good to you? Let’s pick this apple, we’ll open that up, okay, everything looks good. Let’s go back to out object level and select our grid, let’s make our rows and columns two, go back to our shop network and let’s look and see how we got this set up here, it’s on repeat and let’s make it decap. Let’s go to our alt and let’s grab a quick render. This is what it’s going to look like before our displacement, as you can see it’s just a regular ambient occlusion pass. So now that we’ve set up our displacement, let’s go to our material tablet, that’s this one. Just drag and drop click onto out grid.

Now as you can see, we have our apple right in the middle of our grid. This is how you make an ambient occlusion pass inside Houdini and it’s that simple. You lay down your lot template, you did lay down your global illumination your shop network, you point into one another and you have your ambient occlusion. It’s that easy. Thanks for watching guys.