What does screen space ambient occlusion do?
The Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) image effect approximates Ambient Occlusion in realtime, as an image post-processing effect. It darkens creases, holes and surfaces that are close to each other. In real life, such areas tend to block out or occlude ambient light, hence they appear darker.
What does an AO map look like?
AO maps tend to only have subtle shadows and highlights, which are then usually overlaid on other maps (usually diffuse, but some people combine it with their metalness or specular maps instead). This is done in 2D software such as Photoshop.
What is nVIDIA ambient occlusion?
Ambient occlusion is a technique used in production to approximate the effect of environment lighting. The end result is a fast, GPU-accelerated, high-quality ambient occlusion algorithm that can produce convincing, smooth soft shadows and realistic, sharp local details.
Is ambient occlusion height?
Ambient occlusion (AO) is a technique used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting. In combination with screen space directional occlusion (SSDO), height map AO provides additional shading cues that enhance the depth perception of a scene.
Should I use Nvidia ambient occlusion?
Ambient Occlusion improves shadow detail and lighting effects noticeably, but can cause a significant drop in framerate especially with older hardware. Modern graphics cards will shrug off the change with barely a blip to the framerate, and you’ll get crisp, top-quality textures in return.
Which is better screen space ambient occlusion or SSAO?
Screen space ambient occlusion is a great method in which to develop certain games, and especially great when running a game on perhaps an older PC, or one with low CPU power. SSAO does not use any CPU to work, which provides the gamer with a solid amount of visual eye candy for 1/4th of the output.
How is Horizon based ambient occlusion better than traditional methods?
One of the improvements in comparison with the traditional method described before is that it splits the unit sphere by a horizon line, defined by computing a signed horizon angle at every surface point. …
Is the heightfield limited in screen space ambient occlusion?
Although the heightfield is limited to one depth layer inside the view frustum, screen space ambient occlusion tends to produce perceptually realistic results. However, tracing rays in 3D is wasteful since the input data is a 2D heightfield.
What are the settings for ambient occlusion in Crysis?
Some of the most commonly found settings include SSAO, HBAO, HDAO and VXAO. SSAO or Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion was the type of occlusion introduced by Crytek in their debut of Crysis.