SSAO Pro - High Quality Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion

The amount of keywords used by SSAO Pro will be reduced in the next update. This limitation is annoying :/

 

Hello,

No, it's not possible right now. Although you could do it using a two cameras setup - but for some reason I could only get it to work with the deferred rendering path.

I plan to add this feature to the asset in the future (no ETA yet).

 

Unity 4 have both of them too The difference has to do with the technique used to compute the ambient occlusion factor for each pixel (plus speed and quality). Take a look at the first post in this topic, I added a few comparisons with Unity's SSAO.

 

The Ambient Occlusion one. I couldn't get the last one, "Ambient Obscurance", to look good. It looks even worse than the original one IMO.

 

Yes. It's already being used with Unity 5 and I'll make sure it still works with it once it's out of beta (things may break during the beta cycle).

 

Yes, it's the same one. It's an interesting technique that works fine with high radius AO but not so much with low/medium radius IMO. That's the problem with screen space AO, it's very scene dependent, some techniques will work better than others (high details vs low details environments, cartoon vs realistic rendering, etc).

 

It is.

SSAO Pro disables itself if one of the following is true :

• Image effects aren't supported.
• Render Texture aren't supported.
• The shader isn't supported by your GPU or the target platform.

Could you check the following ?

• Any error in the console ?
• Make sure Graphics Emulation is not set.
• What is the Platform set in Build Settings ?
• Do you have Unity Pro ?

 

Some news about the next update :

I fixed a view space bug (in some cases the AO contribution would act in a weird way, a bit like a specular effect). More importantly, the effect won't have any more restriction regarding the camera near/far clipping planes ! Oculus Rift owners will be glad

I still need to fix a few things but version 1.2 should be up soon.

 

Sorry about the long wait, between Christmas holidays and my internet going down, I've been quite busy ! The plan was to release SSAO Pro 1.2 before Christmas but it took longer than expected. It's still coming, very soon.

The maximum number of shader keywords is an unfortunate limitation (apparently they bumped it to 128 in Unity 5). For what it's worth, version 1.2 will save two more keywords, bringing the requirement down to 10. I could remove all the keywords and use shader passes instead but it would make the code harder to maintain in the long run. I'll see what I can do in future versions, as this error is quite annoying to me too.

 

Version 1.2 is available !

Changelog (1.2) :

• Added : A new, more predictable SSAO variant. This one doesn't depend on the clipping planes and fixes a few self-shadowing bugs. The old SSAO is still available (use the "SSAO Mode" dropdown).
• Modified : The old SSAO mode "1.1 (Legacy)" now uses a higher precision depth map and works better with the forward rendering path.
  
• Modified : Distance cutoff is now always enabled, bringing the "shader keywords" requirement down to 10.
• Modified : The default noise texture is now automatically applied on creation.
  
• Misc : Documentation update.
  
• Note : Due to some heavy refactoring, upgrading from previous version of SSAO Pro may fail. It's best to remove SSAO Pro from your project entirely and re-import the last version.

 

Sorry about that, I'm pushing an update as we speak to fix this !

 

Hotfix 1.2.1 !

Changelog (1.2.1) :

• Fixed : No more HideFlags errors on build.

 

New hotfix !

Changelog (1.2.2) :

• Fixed : Transparent objects aren't affected by the ambient occlusion anymore.

 

As in they don't get AO on them and they don't cast AO. But you'll see the AO behind them if there's any. The AO pass is rendered after opaque geometry but before transparent geometry.

It was already like that in SSAO Pro pre-1.2 but somehow I broke it in 1.2. It's now back to the original behavior.

 

It's a special case, it will get AO. Same with trees, grass, and the likes

 

Thanks for the feedback. I can't officially support Unity 5 because it's still in beta, but I'll look into it anyway and hope that whatever fix I come up with won't get nuked by a future beta update... I'll get back to you soon.

 

Yes that's a feature I'd like to add at some point, if I can manage to do it correctly. I'm still looking for a good way to approach it as it's definitely not easy to implement in this case...

 

UT did some refactoring with their CG include files in Unity 5. Code-wise it's an easy fix, but it means I have to do a Unity 4 and a Unity 5 version... I don't want to have two separate packages so I'll find a way around that. In the meantime, check your PM's !

 

These are script defines, unless I'm mistaken version defines don't work in shaders. I'll bundle both shaders and choose the correct one from script. I don't like the idea of duplicating a shader file with minor changes but I don't think there's a better way to do it in this case.

 

Check your PMs !

 

Check your PMs !
I'll also push the fix to the Asset Store in a few hours.