{"id":1980,"date":"2015-01-28T21:09:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-28T21:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spellcasterstudios.com\/?p=1980"},"modified":"2015-01-24T16:22:09","modified_gmt":"2015-01-24T16:22:09","slug":"a-bit-disappointed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spellcasterstudios.com\/?p=1980","title":{"rendered":"A bit disappointed…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2026with the results of the ambient occlusion in practice\u2026<\/p>\n

It works fine now, but it\u2019s extremely difficult to notice, which makes this whole endeavor kind of pointless\u2026<\/p>\n

\n

\"screen400\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The effect is clearly there (note the corners and the far edges of the shelves), but it doesn\u2019t help much with the whole lack of contrast I wanted to address with this\u2026<\/p>\n

Below you can see the same scene without and with ambient occlusion:<\/p>\n

\"screen404\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"screen405\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Almost identical\u2026 <\/p>\n

The problem is that due to the graphic style we\u2019ve chosen for the game, there\u2019s not much \u201cambient light\u201d going around, it\u2019s mostly direct lighting from light sources, which is unaffected by the ambient occlusion\u2026<\/p>\n

I could tweak this so that I use more ambient light and less directional light (on the space ship that might work very nicely anyway, and I might do it anyway, but even so it doesn\u2019t have as much impact as I\u2019d like)\u2026 In the screenshots below it\u2019s the same comparison, but without any direct light:<\/p>\n

\"screen403\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"screen402\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I can also improve the filtering (I think I\u2019m blurring too much, using a 4×4 box filter), or some kind of sigma curve to make the darker areas darker, or even modulate the direct lighting with the ambient occlusion, but in truth, I think the main problem is that the art isn\u2019t done to work with this\u2026 Just a theory, but I think that for ambient occlusion to work nicely, you have to have stuff with more geometric surface detail, or normal maps\u2026<\/p>\n

Anyway, tomorrow I\u2019m going to do a couple of experiments with this, see if I can reach some useful conclusion, but for now I\u2019m convinced I\u2019m going to have to implement actual shadow-mapping (only for directional and spot lights, which makes it way easier).<\/p>\n

Now listening to \u201cThe Revenge\u201d by \u201cAllen-Lande\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Link of the Day: Some amazing screenshots from PC games\u2026 Some of them are processed or tweaked renderers, but still very impressive: http:\/\/www.neogaf.com\/forum\/showthread.php?t=963160<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026with the results of the ambient occlusion in practice\u2026 It works fine now, but it\u2019s extremely difficult to notice, which makes this whole endeavor kind of pointless\u2026 The effect is clearly there (note the corners and the far edges of the shelves), but it doesn\u2019t help much with the whole lack of contrast I wanted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,147,8],"tags":[254,255,253],"class_list":["post-1980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development","category-chrome-hunter","category-technology","tag-ambient","tag-occlusion","tag-ssao"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spellcasterstudios.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spellcasterstudios.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spellcasterstudios.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spellcasterstudios.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spellcasterstudios.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.spellcasterstudios.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1981,"href":"https:\/\/www.spellcasterstudios.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980\/revisions\/1981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spellcasterstudios.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spellcasterstudios.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spellcasterstudios.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}