Office Hours: ambient occlusion

Here are some images showing the power of Ambient Occlusion in Blender 3D.
In case you don't know, Ambient Occlusion is a global illumination feature that simulates realistic lighting in the 3D scene.
The top image shows the Ambient Occlusion settings used when rendering the attached stills. Click on it to view it full screen size.
the middel and bottom images show renders with and without Ambient Occlusion (AO). Both images were lit exactly the same with a single shadow-casting light but as you can see they look vastly different due to the effectiveness of the AO. Of course using AO results in much longer rendering times but it is well worth the extra effort and time.

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