[sldev] screen space ambient occlusion

[AySz88/Soup]

SSAO is being done in the shadow branch; I don't think they'll be
split from each other.  And with shadows, interior areas will end up
with everything in shadow (unless there are local lights), so you need
something to enhance contrast and depth a bit, which AO does.  While
the screen-space part is a bit of a hack, AO itself is a real-world
phenomenon unrelated to sun shadows, not "faking shadowing" at all.
If you have a cluttered desk, shutter the windows and look at crevices
and creases. :)

I'm not sure of exactly what you're seeing.  But it might be due to
the fact that the data sampling area has to be capped (for performance
reasons - sampling too far away on the screen misses the cache).
Letting it sample arbitrarily far away creates a better result, but
the cost of it balloons from 2-ish ms/frame to 12-ish.

~Cel



On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 9:50 AM, Argent Stonecutter
<secret.argent at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think you're on a better path with shadowing. Getting shadowing right is
> better than trying to fake it with 'ambient occlusion' hacks. They lead to
> unnatural shadows in corners that just scream "computer generated" to me.
> That pile of box is showing a bunch of examples of that. If you count two
> blocks across from the bottom, there's three blocks on the ground leading
> away from the camera with a fourth block on top of the third block. The
> lower left corner of the front face of that block is visibly darker than the
> rest of the block. In real life that face would be almost uniformly
> illuminated.
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