Is it possible to lock/bake/cache ambient occlusion shaders?

[mmlodzienski]

I'd like to be able to use ambient occlusion nodes for procedural shaders - in this example, a road that has dirt built up along the curb. However, once I bring the environment into my animation scene, the cars also generate dirt underneath their wheels. Is there a way to 'freeze' an ambient occlusion shader to stop it from re-evaluating?

[lee_griggs]

Have you tried the Cache shader?

[mmlodzienski]

@Lee Griggs that did not seem to work. I've never used the cache shader before, and haven't found much documentation for it. The page there mentions diamond connections in Hypershade, which I definitely have seen before in shaders that I cannot find right now. Googling 'Maya hypershade diamond connector' doesn't bring anything up.

That page also does not have anything about how to use the cache shader. I inserted it in my network ahead of the ambient occlusion shader, ran a quick IPR, then moved a vehicle, ran the IPR again - the dirt moved with it. I tried this with 'caching' enabled, 'freeze' enabled, and both enabled - no luck. What am I missing?

[lee_griggs]

It may not be what you want. The cache shader only speeds up things under very specific conditions. So you will see no difference in look, just a speedup. 1) you need a slow shading tree 2) within that shading tree you need to find the sub-tree that is A) slow and B) feeds into multiple shader nodes. That pattern means that the slow subtree will be evaluated multiple times for every shader node it feeds into. In between those nodes and the slow subtree you insert a cache shader it should speed things up.

Maybe you want to use render the selection to texture instead?