SSAO Pro - High Quality Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion

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SSAO Pro offers a high-quality, stable and fast version of SSAO for Unity with added features like lighting contribution, distance cutoff with smooth falloff and occlusion color.

Asset Store | Itch.io
Documentation | Website​

SSAO (short for Screen-space ambient occlusion) approximates ambient occlusion in realtime. It relies on the depth and normals buffers to darkens creases, holes and surfaces that are close to each other. In real life, such areas tend to block out or occlude ambient light, hence they appear darker.

High Quality
Adds a whole new visual dimension to your scenes using a stable and powerful algorithm.

Optimized
Quality settings, downsampling levels, variable blur quality... Fine-tune the effect to your needs !

Customizable
Wide or sharp radius, intensity, occlusion distance and color, distance falloff... Plenty of settings to tweak !

Full source code included.

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Regarding performances compared to Unity's SSAO using the highest possible quality (LC = Lighting Contribution, DC = Distance Cutoff) :

• SSAO Pro (High, LC & DC enabled, Downsampling: 1, No Blur) : 0.998ms
• SSAO Pro (High, LC & DC enabled, Downsampling: 1, Bilateral Blur) : 1.290ms
• SSAO Pro (High, LC & DC enabled, Downsampling: 2, Bilateral Blur) : 0.507ms

• Unity SSAO (High, Downsampling: 1, Blur: 0) : 1.130ms
• Unity SSAO (High, Downsampling: 1, Blur: 1) : 1.692ms
• Unity SSAO (High, Downsampling: 2, Blur: 1) : 0.990ms

Lower is better. Please note that these numbers will vary from computer to computer depending on their specs.

I also made a quick speed/quality comparison using a variety of setting combinations. You can find it in this post.

Unity 4.5+ Pro or Unity 5.0+ (Personal or Pro) is required. Tested on desktop platforms (DirectX 9, DirectX 11, OpenGL). Although it could potentially work with OpenGL ES 2.0 and 3.0, I wouldn't recommend using this on mobile devices. It's a high-end effect, the performance cost would be too expensive for these platforms to handle at a smooth framerate. Even though the shader used in this asset is quite optimized, SSAO in itself still is an expensive effect and requires a powerful computer to run at very high settings.

Models & Textures in screenshots and video by Manufactura K4 and Unity Technologies (not included in the package).

 

Version 1.0.2 is available !

Changelog (1.0.2) :

• Added a new quickstart launcher when you import or update SSAO Pro.
  
• Added "About SSAO Pro" and "SSAO Pro Manual" in the Help menu.
  
• Fixed : The effect wasn't working properly in DirectX mode using the forward rendering path and MSAA.
• Misc : Various documentation fixes & additions.

Don't forget to rate it on the Asset Store

 

HBAO, no, because it's a fair bit slower than SSAO (which is already quite expensive) so not really worth it.

HBAO+... Maybe, I need to look into it but can't promise anything. I'm actually quite happy with the results I'm getting with SSAO Pro. But yeah, maybe in the future I'll dig into HBAO+.

Edit: btw, if anyone is able to find a paper about HBAO+ I'd love to see it because at the moment it's nowhere to be seen. I hope it won't be another secret driver-only implementation, like TXAA...

 

No, I will try to post some tomorrow so you can see the difference in quality (speed is in the first post) !

 

Animated objects and characters ? Moving lights (this SSAO effect takes lighting into consideration) ?

If you only want static AO, you can of course bake it using 3dsmax, Maya or anything else but that's not what this asset is about.

So, I tried to get the highest quality I could from the default SSAO to do a comparison, but as the algorithms used aren't the same it wasn't easy. Here you go :

(left) SSAO Pro | Unity SSAO (right)

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As you can see, SSAO Pro is better at finding small creases, details in normal and parallax maps. It's more precise in general. It's also faster, as shown the first post. And, in this case, the SSAO Pro screenshots don't even have the blur pass activated (less GPU stress, two draw calls saved, almost twice as fast as the screenshots with the default SSAO) and it looks good already

 

Indeed, my fault, because it's the best way to showcase SSAO Some actually have animations and moving lights but it's a bit hard to see in such a short time with a moving camera.

I'll try to post a demo using an animated character when I get the chance !

 

No price increase planned at the moment. I have a small list of features I'd like to add or improve to make it more complete, but nothing that would justify a price bump.

 

I'd like to add a way to exclude some layers from the SSAO pass that doesn't require the use of two cameras

Edit : see this.

 

No it doesn't require two cameras. I said I'd like to add a feature to exclude layers from the SSAO pass, which can already be done by using two cameras but would be easier if it was just a layers dropdown in the SSAO Pro UI. The effect itself only require one camera.

It "works" with the Oculus Rift, but from what I understand it has issues with large radius (ghosting effect), like the default SSAO. I'm not sure how to fix it at the moment. Not having an Oculus Rift to test it myself isn't helping. Handling depth-based effects with VR can be quite complicated, especially when you don't have the hardware to experiment on :/

 

Yes but it doesn't in any way help me experience the ghosting effect. Looking at a single flat screen with my two eyes and having a separate render isolated for each eye is quite different.

 

Thanks, I'll try to build a small OR demo.

AFAIK they haven't done anything to the SSAO and SAO shaders in Unity 5. But it's still in beta so it's hard to say if they will be improved in the final version.

Probably, it's a standard post processing effect so I see no reason why it wouldn't work with Unity 5. As a matter of fact it should be faster than in Unity 4 with the new full-deferred rendering path (direct access to the normal & depth buffers)

 

Yes !

 

Version 1.1 is available !

Changelog (1.1) :

• Added : Downsampling. You can choose to downsample the AO pass only or AO + Blur, so you can better control the speed-quality ratio depending on your scene.
• Removed : Useless Bilateral Threshold parameter. This is now hardcoded into the shader.
• Misc : Documentation update. The Performances section has been rewritten and populated with more useful data.

I also made a quick speed/quality comparison using a variety of setting combinations (warning, massive picture) :

 

It works fine with DoF, at least it did in my tests. Regarding fog, you can play with the Distance Cutoff & Falloff settings to gently fade the SSAO as it enters the fog

 

Well, it also depends on the AO radius and the general look you're going for It's pretty much scene dependent, there's unfortunately no way to come up with an universal set of settings that would work for every scene.

 

I actually have one in the work, but my time is quite limited these days. It's already working but it's missing a few features at the moment. If I don't find the time to finish it I'll probably release it for free and let the community improve it.

 

Ultimately I'd like to add a few different AO algorithms so the user can choose one that fits his game better than the others. I haven't decided on which ones yet.

 

I had a few people test it with the OR and it worked fine with low and medium radius at znear = 0.3 but being able to drop this to 0.1 or 0.05 would indeed be better for VR in general.

But yes, this limitation is bothering me as well and I'm looking into it (it has to do with the non-linear depth buffer precision), I need to find a way around it.

Read my last post in this topic