Hey,
For my christmas contribution this year, I am releasing a script, demo, and tutorial on SSAO!

Because so many of you guys have been asking for it, I will provide it.

In a minute I will upload some pictures of the shader.

The Screen Space Ambient Occlusion shader runs efficientley enough to implement in your 3D game and transforms occluded areas into realistic shadows that can make your image "pop out" of the screen! In my implementation, you simply need to create an extra view which renders each pixels depth to the camera which then feeds into a post processing view that calculates the per pixel ambient occlusion. The result can be added or multiplied to the final scene or used in the camera's shaders to effect specualr highlights and other shadow-dependent factors.

Please note that the lighter shadows in the scene are actuallt NOT the SSAO (they are a HUGE VSM effect covering 1000 quants). The process I developed also eliminates false edges and occlusion without a edge detection system. This speeds up the shader by nearly 2 times over the classic implementation!!! I also used a fixed texture kernal so there is virtually no noise! pixel samples are repeated every nxn sample to allow for larger scale occlusions however the non-rotated kernal means no noise. Please enjoy this, I will release it a bit closer to Christmas. -Mike-

http://img185.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot1zv5.jpg

image shack is being painfully slow today

http://img178.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot3kg9.jpg

This one has some wierd halos around the horizon, this doesn't occur when running (probably because there is no background):
http://img185.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot2mz3.jpg

http://img185.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot4kk8.jpg

ImageShack is angry at me XD I'll upload the rest later - Mike-

g'day Foxfire,

can you show us screenshots that only show the ambient occlusion, or some that accentuate it, so it's more obvious?

it does look good though, and sounds very clever :P

julz

ambient term only:
http://img71.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot2kg6.jpg
http://img389.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot0mo6.jpg

ambient term + diffuse term:
http://img389.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot0ze5.jpg
http://img71.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot1eu1.jpg

This first examples are Ambient + Diffuse + shadows + textures.
Note the last example. The occlusion is correctley portrayed even at multiple distances. The wires from the pipleine occlude only against the pillars (not the sky or other wires). Objects closer to the camera also occlude without unwanted bias (and objects very far away). Also notice how deeper occlusions are darker, in all these examples I super saturated the ambient result to highlight the ambient occlusion. This can easily be modified for a more realistic level of AO in your game. You can also reduce the "radiosity exposure" to increase the amount of gradation between deep and shallow occluders (again, I set the exposure very high so that all occlusions would be considered very "deep").

good night - Michael H Auerbach -

Looks very nice.

FPS/system specs?

will be a nice cont. btw.

So, I could combine it with my own shadowmapping? The question is, how fast it is? Would it be faster if I would render it in a smaller view, scale it up and then box-blur it?

Bye,
Christian

box-bluring an ssao shader or a shadowmapping shader is a very very bad idea. especially since its hard enough to not get black or light halos around every thing, let alone if the blur adds even more to it.