[GIVEAWAY] 5 x Volumetric Ambient Occlusion!

We are giving away 5 vouchers for free download of our Volumetric Ambient Occlusion (VAO) plugin!

VAO is our fast and high quality SSAO solution to improve scenes with soft ambient shadows.

How to apply:
1. Download a demo package of our plugin
2. Make a screenshot of your project with VAO effect enabled (preferably also without it for comparison)
3. Post it in this thread before midnight of February 5th

We will pick 5 best screenshots and send posters the voucher code.

Hope you will like VAO! Don't hesitate to ask and discuss.

 

Thanks everybody who took part in our giveaway, we will go over the submissions and winners will be sent the asset vouchers.

(Welp, this was embarassing - time for that bucket of chocolate icecream while I cry myself to sleep)

 

Just found your VAO. I wonder how it compares to HBAO.

 

I could praise our asset to high heavens here but there is a free full-featured demo - so I'll let our work speak for itself. Try it out, see for yourself, tell me what you think

 

Thanks. I'm comparing it to a couple of alternative AO assets.

 

VAO



HBAO



Keijiro's DeferredAO (yeah, it's a whole different ballgame)



No AO

 

VAO with Color Bleeding
Hm, doesn't seem to have any effect - maybe after some tweaking or manual reading.



HBAO with Color Bleeding

 

Well for colorbleed to have some effect, you would need some colored surfaces.




Your second image (HBAO with Color Bleeding) actually looks like it's bleeding whites(greys) which supresses the ambient shadow (bottom part of the sphere and the floor below it)

 

I've done some tests too, but had a deadline so I couldn't post the results earlier, work was more important:
With VAO (That tiny line is caused by the watermark, it's not a rendering problem, I checked):

Without VAO

VAO Only

I tried color bleed too, but this scene isn't ideal for using it, so I skipped.

 

Right, HBAO multiplies albedo color with bounce color.

Looks like there are some scenarios where HBAO with Color Bleeding produces artifacts and VAO with Color Bleeding does not.

For example, here is a HDR scene with emission on the yellow material set to 2. All surfaces are non-specular. I've disabled bloom for clarity. HBAO seems to take emission into account so you can kinda fake GI, but it's not very pretty.




On the other hand, VAO appears to omit emission, but color bleeding is taking place: the yellow blends with the green floor.

 

It looks like you already have some SSAO active in the scene - there are shadows cast by wardrobe and chest on the left wall even in the second screenshot, check what effects are attached to your main camera. This seems to be making the first screenshot too dark.
Also, could you post a screenshot of only the AO part? (the second checkbox in the top-left corner)

 

What do you mean by 'appears to omit emission'? Color bleed is not really about emmisive glow - you can get that with Unity out of the box. Color bleed is basically indirect lighting - ambient light that bounces off and reflects from other objects.

 

Let me rephrase: when you enable color bleeding in HBAO, objects with emission bleed on near surfaces resulting in that strange effect seen above. The developer explains that happens because color bleeding in HBAO is a bonus feature that trades-off accuracy for performance. In VAO the color bleeding algorithm is different: it doesn't cause that strange side-effect from emission. This is just an observation, not a call to action or something to either dev.

 

Oh, I see, interesting... well in VAO both colorbleed and AO are computed together in a single pass. I agree however, that colorbleed is more of a bonus feature (we added it only after people kept asking about it)

 

I edited my post, now I removed all post-processing scripts that were attached to the camera and kept VAO only.

 

Well, this looks like you've set the radius way too high - as a rule of thumb the features produced by ambient occlusion should be around 10cm. Try lowering the radius until you see the shadow on the left wall cast by the wardrobes and on the floor around the legs of the chest (like the floor by the dragon)

 

I edited it again, it was 5, now I've set it to 0.45, anything higher than 0.50 feels out of place imo.

 

I hope I am not too late????