Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012)

This is an interesting read, but I wonder if we're going to see SSAO/HBAO becoming less relevant in the near future with the prevalence hardware which can handle ray-tracing and other real-time global illumination techniques like voxel-cone tracing. SSAO has been a valuable technique in terms of adding a lot of depth to real-time renders with a relatively low cost/quality ratio, but at the end of the day it's more or less a neat trick which is not physically based…

> Game developers are in love with screenspace ambient occlusion (SSAO). I work in 3d and I think I can say with confidence that developers are not in love with SSAO. It's just that real ambient occlusion for moving models is both really hard to set up and would totally blow the performance budget for most games, while in most 3d engines you can add SSAO in couple of minutes and it costs ~1ms per frame. That will hopefully change…

Having more of the history of SSAO, and measuring some rendered images in the same way, would help this article.. Several corrections here: 1) Historically, SSAO was never intended solve wall corners. That was already being done with baked textures, in games like Doom and Quake. It was first used in CryEngine to show deep crevices in fabric folds, and plants. Objects that capture light. 2) The examples of 'ugly' artifacts are just that, incorrect implementations. There should be no…