Hello, I am working in the field of urban design and could make super good use visualizing city scale models with ambient occlusion. Sadly the distance and intensity sliders don’t work for me, working in this scale. The effect is barely visible 
The only way ist too scale the model down to 10% - but this is super annoying. Is there a way to come around this bug? Is there maybe any extension or script for a workaround? Any help would be highly appriciated.
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While it’s very nice to have a built in AO in SU now I find that I still use my 3rd party Ambient Occlusion plugin from time to time.
At $129 it was a bargin for my needs. I’ve been using it for 5 years now iirc. Maybe give the 10day trial a chance and see how it does for you?
Yeah, heard about that. But shouldn’t there be a simple fix for it, as it is just just a conversion problem? I am totaly fine with the result I get at 10% so I either just need the slider to go more to the right or treat meters like centimeters for this effect. The way this feature was promoted over the last year I excpected to work a bit better.. There is no problem in Rhino with this as well..
Scale your model down for presentation?
SKP was built for architecture sized projects. Not for making tiny things, and not for making giant things. It struggles at both ends of the spectrum.
Use Rhino then?
This has come up in a feature request before, but who knows if / when it will make it into a new release.
There is talk about this internally, I’m not sure where the conversation got to though.
I was going to suggest what Mike was talking about. If you select your entire model and make it be a component, you can put a .1 scale copy of the component off in the side of the scene, and zoom into that. The AO is then a lot more dramatic.
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Thanks for the advices guys! Having a workaround is good, but it would be wonderful to have a solution as it is always is a little anoying if you have a display model and switch back to your working model in the design process.. I though someone might have found a trick or an extensions that just fakes the dimensions to have the desired effect..
Make the entire model a component. Make a copy of it.
Put the copies on separate tags.
Turn one off.
Scale one down.
Create a scene with the ambient occlusion on as you would like.
If you need dimensions / documentation you can manually adjust your dimensions in LayOut for the scaled down scene.
Assuming everything in the components are also components - anything you do in the original will be affected in the small, just as scale.