Hi,
after developing my Wavefield demo for the shader contest, I tried something new and started writing a GS SSAO implementation. The technique is very similar to the one described in the Starcraft2 paper.
Here are some screenshots (2x with+without+ssao_mask):







http://img527.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=ssao1with.png

It´s still not perfect as I downsample the depthmap for a around 10fps performance boost, but get artifacts depending on the lost of information.
The shown screens run with about 80-100fps here...

Some feedback would be cool

regards,
Hummel

PS: Winning a Prof version from the contest could motivate me to upload the Demo+sourcecode^^

looks like you are already winning a Pro edition, afaik 2 pro editions awareded this time. as first and second prize.

would love get my hands on that.

i second that

I'm still thinking that SSAO is one of the most useless shader... All I can see is that with ssao, objects have a dark glow.

I know SSAO should give the scene more depth, but I simply can't see any difference?!
Or am I overlooking something?

(@Hummel: Please don't see this as negativ criticsm of your work!)

Oh-I forgot to mention that it is a small level with some newton-physics
I decided to use a physic-level to get an extremly dynamic scene.

Thx for the comments!

@dark_samurai: normaly SSAO shouldn´t give a dark glow as long as an oject is f.e. not directly in front of a wall.
The SSAO term (should) decribe/s wich parts of the scene were generally reached by less light.
Imo the quality difference is quite big-f.e. it gives the player more information about the distance between objects.

I don't know what is meant with depth, but ambient occlusion adds shadow where we normally expect shadow, mainly where edges and objects touch each other.
When you look at the pic above 'without SSAO', there are no shadows or darkness between and under the objects, and that looks as if the objects fly or have unnatural lights attached.

SSAO is what bump mapping was a few years ago... It was the latest technolegy, which many considered to be to slow to be used in realtime, when it was used in Crysis and now it is on its best way to get a standart. Interesting is only going to be which way of doing it is going to be the most popular one.
In my opinion, it can help to add a lot of additional depth and atmosphere into a scene and is just an awsome technique

I am amazed by Hummels results, although there is of course still a lot of space for improvements

I don't really like SSAO myself, mostly because I have A6 and I can't use it, haha.

But to help you see the difference. SSAO gives objects shading and shadows like on an overcast day. You have no real shadows, but when something is near another surface you can see a extremely blurry shadow, more of a dark blob.

I know that is not what SSAO does, but to the "amateur" (no offense) that's the easiest way to comprehend it.

As for the screens: Nice, what GPU do you have? 80-100 fps on 1680x1050?

I have read that some graphic cards will do AO automatically if you switch this on in their driver. So it might be that such custom shader AO effects will become redundant in the future.

This doesn't look half bad
There is still much room for improvement of course (you know that yourself i guess ), but efficient ssao really is a b1tch to create.

We should exchange ssao shaders sometime, mix them up and maybe finally create a working one for the sake of pushing A7 ?

Anyway, good work and keep it up!