Office Hours: street scene tests

Here are two brand new images from 3D animated short film Office Hours.
One of them is late evening still of a partially modelled street rendered using nothing but Ambient Occlusion. You can see that the models look more "solid" than previously which is mostly due to the fact that they don't look plastic anymore!
The other image is a daylight street scene test render. As you can see it's coming along nicely even when lit very basically. This scene features a small sky dome of hemi lights (with specular turned off), a single shadow lamp (only casts shadows) and Ambient Occlusion. It's too bright and there aren't enough areas of high contrast shading - plus the AO samples are much too low - but it is certainly beginning to "feel" like the kind of street we envisioned when writing the script (ie: Edward Hopper-esque; and if you don't know who Edward Hopper is then go here).

More images to follow.

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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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