See that image? That’s something that I see way too much of: Yet another attempt at an AO (Ambient Occlusion) render in Blender, as I discover another problem in the mesh that didn’t become obvious until I asked the render engine to throw light at it. This one? That’s a 507/23 Barrack Block (or “Building 116 at Tangmere” for those who know it…) that I’ve been trying to do for weeks. See those black faces on the right hand window? They’re reversed polygons, which I’ve flipped, which is why the render is running again… and again… and, oh for goodness sakes, this takes ages!

For those that don’t know, an AO render creates a false light directly overhead the centre point of the mesh and then it uses the material properties to calculate direct illumination, reflection and shadow. It’s one of a number of layers used in the creation of textures, most of which I don’t use because, well, to be honest, I’m not a very good texture artist and all those layers use up additional memory in the sim, which is already very memory restricted.

Thankfully, you can set the number of “passes” that the render engine draws, so for fault finding, I can set it down to, say, 32 or 64, then only whack it up to 128 once I’ve debugged it all. Right now it’s doing a 64, which says a lot about the confidence I have that it’ll be the final pass… <sigh>

/Ian P goes to make more tea, because as interesting as it is, you can only watch this process so many times…