It will be wise to render out a specular pass while we are at it because scanline renderer has to be replaced with mental ray in order to render the occlusion pass.

The Specular Pass:

For the specular pass the point lights should be turned on to create the highlights. Remember that my scene point lights only affect the specular component of the surfaces not diffuse. Skylight remains turned off. To render out a seperate pass for specular highlights we will be using render elements. This can be done from the Render Scene Dialog, Render Elements Panel. By pressing Add.. button and choosing “Specular” from the list we activate the specular highlights pass for this scene to be rendered out seperately.

After filling in a proper name and defining the output path, we render the scene once again. After the rendering is finished if you haven’t unchecked the Display Elements option from the Render Elements Panel the specular pass would be displayed as a seperate virtual frame buffer. The pass takes 59 seconds to render and looks like:

As I said earlier, before rendering the occlusion pass, mental ray has to be assigned as the current renderer from the Render Scene Dialog. The option can be found under the Common tab of the dialog box. Now on to the occlusion pass.