AO/ ambient occlusion,/dirt in creases.

[droon]

Here is pretty nice tutorial on how to use texture>effects>ambient occlusion in the alpha channel of your material to get dirt in deeper places. in c4d. I often need to render polished bronze which has a similar effect.

http://www.3dluvr.com/carles/Tut02en.htm

Anyone know how to do this in indigo/cindigo? I usually just do "convert materials" in the c4d plugin menu, but that doesn't work this time.

[zeitmeister]

Indigo doesn't know Ambient Occlusion, because it's some kind of biased renderer accurancy enhancement fake.
The only way to use your technique is a mix material with a mask texture, containing the baked ambient occlusion pass of the object as a greyscale image.

So try the following:
- Choose you object and say "Render > Bake object".
- In the upcoming dialogue, you should only choose "Ambient Occlusion".
- Specify your output path and "Bake".

C4D will disable your original object and place a new one above it, attached a material with the baked textures.
If you check your baking output path, you will find a generated Ambient Occlusion texture. There's no need to unwrap your object properly; C4D will generate an UV Layout for you.

Anyway: this generated texture could be used as the mask for your two metal materials.
If you are not sure how to use mix materials, have a look in the manual, otherwise go to the material database here; there you will find numerous materials using this technique.

I hope I could help you!

[droon]

heh. sometimes biased renderer accurancy enhancement fakes are good for things they weren't designed for. But the baking solution sounds sweet, if i figure baking out I could probably get some other c4d material tricks into indigo. So tnx for the tips!

[zeitmeister]

For sure,

and post your results with this technique! The screws look very nice with that...