Ambient Occlusion/Masking Tutorial

This is just a useful technique I started experimenting with, rendering out masks and lighting from a 3D program (Maya) to make painting a lot easier, have more control and this workflow is non-destructive.

I find it's most useful for when you have a basemesh modeled and you want to do a paintover of the final design before spending hours sculpting/texturing. But if you are just a 2D artist you can technically hand paint each layer and your final result will have a pretty cool look. There are a few tutorials for this technique out there, but I thought I would just make one since I recorded my whole process.

Basically to get the masks you assign a different colored material to each object you want isolated and render with flat lighting. In photoshop use the magic wand tool to select the parts you want isolated, or create groups with layer masks for each part.

The lighting works best when you isolate different elements so you can play with the intensity and stuff in Photoshop. Put the AO and shadow on multiply and for the lights I used screen or color dodge.

Then you can paint your details underneath and the lighting will be on top. You can also assign color to the light layers, like if you want colored rim lighting or non-black shadows, it's pretty easy and non-destructive.

I made a group and layers above everything for additional design elements that weren't made in 3D yet and it still works pretty good.

There's also a video (no audio) of exporting the masks from Maya here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=niNrqA…

And a Timelapse video (no audio) of the paint process (5 hours cut down to 12 mins) www.youtube.com/watch?v=cucD3T…

Hopefully this inspires you. See the full final artwork:  The Nightwatch