Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion(will call it AO in this post~) measures the amount that a point on a surface is obscured from light that might otherwise arrive from the outside. The result of this method will simulate a soft self-shadow to the model and add a great deal of believability to the lighting. In this demo I used both software and hardware implementations as below:

Hemispherical visibility test:
As shown in the picture below, rays are traced outward from a given surface point p over the hemisphere around the normal N. we check if these rays hit any other sufaces to calculate the accessibility of p; the more rays hit other surfaces, the lower the accessibility. And finally we gather all these values and store them in vertex color for rendering.

I used the method above and used random 512 rays per vertex to calculate the vertex color. Due to the software implemetation, the speed of calculating the result was way too slow for real time purpose @_@; But the result was kind of nice~ The rendering results are the pictures below( click to see the original size^^)~


Depth Map Based Ambient Occlusion Lighting:
As below, the 2nd method is to surrounding the scene with a sphere of lights. The light directions are used for sample weighting, while associated depth maps are used for visibility determination. We can see that the lights here are similar as rays in Hemispherical visibility test. After all the shadow map comparisons, we will have the accessibility of all vertices and we can use the scene's texture coordinate as output position to output accessibility as an AO texture. With this texture, we can just use it to render AO without doing calculations again.

Below are the result using Depth map AO rendering. With the support of hardware, the speed of calculating AO improves aaallllooot!( an 512x512 AO map only takes few secs ). One thing worth mentioning is that there are artifacts in the woman's rendering result. This is due to the duplicated vertex normals( could see the lines even if I only do diffuse lighting calculation ). But the sheep didnt have this problem when I rendered it, so there are some restrictions when choosing models for this rendering method.


Render result, notice the artifacts?



The calculated AO map looks like this~

Although Depth map is faster than Hemispherical visibility test, it still can't reach the real time speed. I know there is already a way to render Dynamic AO in GPU Gems2. So both these methods will retire soon~@_@; Yea, I will take some time to see how Dynamic AO works~ ^_^;