Better Ambient Occlusion in Eevee, same technique as the Area Light
Hi, I'm sure that everyone will like this proposal for Eevee, because an idea came to my mind. Why not add a better Ambient Occlusion feature, just the same technique as the Area Light. Please don't judge my picture, it's not realistic for unknown reason, maybe because Multiple Area Lights are not meant to be for AO.
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The Ambient Occlusion same technique as the Area Light I proposed:
Pros:
- It looks much more better than the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion.
Cons:
- It's slower than SSAO due to the multiple imaginary sun lights, but it's not that a problem, use it for final render on Eevee, or just add an option if you want to use SSAO instead of that proposed AO.
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Ambient Occlusion as Multiple Area Lights:
Pros:
- It looks better than Screen Space Ambient Occlusion.
Cons:
- Its size is limited, it's not a sphere, that's why it's not very similar to Cycles.
- It's visible to the reflection because an Area Light is visible to reflection.
6 Comments
This is a wrong request. You should not want ambient occlusion, as it's a very primitive approximation of a constant color environment. In realtime renderers like Eevee, AO should serve mainly to complement inaccurate GI lighting, but it should never ever serve as a means of environment lighting replacement.
What you want is this: devtalk.blender.org/t/eevee-soft-shadows-for-environment-light/5256
I've requested it already long time ago, so if you want to see it implemented sooner, please contribute to my thread. The more voice, the better.
That's not a reason not to do it. Having options is good. Cycles can produce physically accurate GI, yet it can still do AO. There are lots of use cases for the feature- it isn't mutually exclusive with GI.
Also, there's other kinds of computer rendering than photorealistic rendering. In non-photorealistic rendering, it's often better to use "fake" methods and approximations, since reality is what you're trying to get away from.
Outside in ambient occlusion discrete virtual lights was mentioned in this paper researchgate.net/publication/266873735_Scalable_Ambient_Occlusion_for_Molecular_Visualisation
I bet, RTX support in EEVEE would be waaaay better. And it could work on 10xx cards as well, just slower.
* @damian winnichenko * But my laptop doesn't support RTX, it's a technology that everyone doesn't have yet.
* @mandadream3d * That isn't a reason not to do it. But the rest of the items on the to-do list might be a reason why it won't happen soon. But with NVidia's involvement, who knows? Could happen as fast as Optix support is happening.