Cycles, Using Ambient Occlusion as a Factor in Material Node Editor I'm trying to give cavities a different shader in between adjacent objects "Dirt Map", I tried using Geometry Node, linking the Pointiness to Color Ramp to the Factor in a Mix Shader, as per the image above. The problem is, this works just fine within the mesh itself, but it wont capture cavities between different objects, I tried merging the meshes into one object using Ctrl+J, but that didn't change the result. Logically I tried to use Ambient Occlusion as a Factor for the Mix Shader, but Ambient Occlusion is a Shader, not a value provider node, is there a way to capture the value from AO shader to use it for Factor, or is there a completely different way to achieve this?
In the node editor Shift + A then under input you'll find Ambient Occlusion, the node itself shows in the image above, you can use AO output as a factor to feed to a Mix Shader node or a MixRGB node or... whatever you would use a factor for.