EEVEE: Restore old SSAO as option
EEVEE Next's raytracing capabilities are wonderful but I sorely miss the behavior of the old Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion. It was less accurate for rendering but a blessing for game asset creation in Material Preview.
The new behavior (when set to AO-only) is smeary, overenthusiastic and less performant. The old AO was tighter, higher contrast and very informative when modeling with full PBR textures shown. EEVEE with SSAO was an absolute dream when modeling game assets.
You can see in this example that it's more difficult to tell what surfaces objects are contacting or close to, and there's less contrast to separate them visually. The new behavior is more accurate but less informative and changes much more drastically with viewing angle.
This is NOT a proposal to replace the current system. Just to add an additional option in the EEVEE render settings for the old SSAO (or something best approximating that old method).
3 Comments
Is that image on the right using a recent Blender 5.2 Alpha? Because EEVEE has seen massive changes recently, including AO: developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/5.2/eevee/
Download the daily build and try it out: builder.blender.org
Thanks for the heads-up on that! I tried 5.2 alpha and the result was very similar to the 5.0 I was using for the above screenshot. It's mostly due to the fact that both use screen-space RTGI whereas old EEVEE used an older SSAO technique. It was less accurate but offered excellent readability in the scene and better approximated cheaper SSAO techniques that are still used in games.
You could play around with lighting or just make edges sharp and live within edit mode.
I don't see any use case for the old EEVEE except maybe performance on low-end devices.
Correct me if I missed the point entirely.