SSAO Pro - High Quality Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion

Reimporting the project now until 5.1.1 to see if 5.1 fixed the issue, I'll report back if it doesn't. If not I'll try commenting out that attribute to see how things look. Thanks for helping with this, I know it's not a problem created by your asset and appreciate the time!

5.1.1 didn't fix the issue, but commenting out that line did get us up and running until they fix the bug at least. Thanks!

 

Hi.
It's not SSAO Pro bug, but I just wonder why SSAO Effect increases "Nature/Tree Soft Occlusion Leaves" so much. It's also happened with Unity Built-in SSAO.
Each tree with no SSAO uses 3 draw calls with batching, but it spends 8-10 draw calls with SSAO.
I don't want an AO to my tree leaves, but SSAO won't skip them. "Show AO" shows leaves itself with colored.

Is there any way to avoid this? (My unity version is 4.6.1, deferred rendering / linear )

 

Thanks for reply.
I don't know which is self-shadowing artifacts, but I use 1.2 of latest version.

 

Hi guys, here's the solution for people having issues with SSAO Pro making their custom shaders semi-transparent (SSAO effect appearing over the opaque parts of their meshes): http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/sessao-high-quality-ssao-w-color-bleed.323511/page-4#post-2200447

 

So I'm currently having issues getting the SSAO Pro effect to render properly in a 2 camera setup. I was previously using the standard SSAO effect in Unity 4.6 on the 1st rendered camera set to clear flag of Skybox and the 2nd rendered camera (rendered "on top" of the 1st) was set to clear flag of Depth Only. This worked fine. I wanted to upgrade to Unity 5.1 though and now this does not work. I'm trying this new SSAO Pro effect and it doesn't work either. The 2nd camera seems to just be completely destroying the effect and/or depth buffer of the 1st. The Sun Shafts effect does seem to work, but only when placed on the 2nd camera. It seems to use depth info from both cameras. I tried placing the SSAO Pro effect on the 2nd camera then but that still does not work. Is there any solution for this? There has to be a way to use the depth buffer of both cameras if the built-in Sun Shafts effect seems capable of doing it just fine.

 

Yeah, I've gotten around this by having my 2nd camera set to Forward rendering and just put all my image effects on my main 1st camera. I don't really need all the image effects applied to my 2nd camera since it's only for "weapons", but it would sure be nice to have it working on both cameras. I've never submitted a bug report before. Is there a way that I can add to the one you submitted so they know this is happening for multiple users?

 

Any further update on this? Does the latest version still have these issues? Assuming it is not yet fixed, if it would be helpful, I can get access to a Radeon card for testing and can potentially help test if you have potential fixes to try.

 

The performance impact of this effect is independend from vertex/triangle amount of the scene, right?

 

Hey, we just bought your SSAO effect today and it's really good and flexible. Congrats.
However it didn't work out of the box on PS4. Not much to fix but had to change COLOR semantic with SV_Target in all three shader sources. Just for you to know.
Cheers.

 

I also have the grid of dots when downsampling. AMD gpu in the PS4.

 

Hey there ! We are using your plugin on Unity 5, but on your scene it seems that activating the HDR mode on the camera makes the effect acting weird. It seems that it's inverted. We must keep the HDR, so how can it be fixed? thanks !

 

@cayouMontreal Do you have anti aliasing disabled in your quality settings? That setting and HDR fight each other in a strange way. AA should be disabled if you're using HDR

 

AFAIK you can just use SV_Target regardless on any platform so a define wouldn't be needed? Have to check as I'm going off memory here.

 

Thanks for replying, we discovered that HDR combined with command buffer decals will invert the SSAO pro (white is black and black is white). If I turn off HDR or remove decal command buffer on camera, everything is fine. But we must keep HDR and decals on our project. Do you have any idea why this is happening?
You can test it easily by downloading the package from UT here:
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/02/06/extending-unity-5-rendering-pipeline-command-buffers/

I though we can just invert the result of SSAO but it might break at some point (due to extreme HDR values?).

My 3d artist went crazy when we added the SSAO from Unity into the project (it adds a LOT visually), but unfortunately the original SSAO from UT doesn't provide any distance cut-off, and we have some far objects that we don't want to apply SSAO, that's why your plugin is perfect.

Thanks !

 

That command buffer decal package is quite broken, and when we tried to extend it we found several bugs related to the Gbuffers, but only when using HDR. FYI

 

Deferred decals are quite buggy indeed, if you try to destroy them sometimes they won't for example. But it's amazing how fast they are compared to a CPU way of doing decals.
We do have a graphics programmer on our team, but he's quite busy these days, so I was looking for your help to get this amazing SSAO plugin into our game.

 

I made some screenshots. The first one is without HDR/deferred decals, the second one is with both HDR/deferred decals.
It seems that is inverted, maybe inverting result of SSAO might resolve this, dunno.

 

I will try it out, thanks !

 

As I might expect, the result is not exactly the inverse :-/

 

FYI the native SSAO is working with both HDR and deferred decals, our graphics programmer will quickly try to modify the original SSAO to implement some cut-off option.
It's weird that the native SSAO is working with these settings where yours is not, you must something that interfere with the deferred decals, but I don't know what.

 

Same result, it's not because of the HDR alone, but mixed with deferred decals it breaks your plugin.
We managed to modify the native SSAO to add a range on it, and it works well. We will go with that even if the original SSAO is not that beautiful. If you want to test it yourself, download the command buffers samples from Unity blog (link posted few messages above).

We think it might also breaks another post effect we are using: SMAA from the community, because SMAA uses also the depth buffer to calculate things. That might explain why the result was barely noticeable.

 

Ahahah yes indeed
It was just a assumption, on our game your SMAA is not changing a lot of things, the most noticeable aliasing is the "specular" one (we are using a shader with rim lighting). It seems working on certain objects only, it's hard to understand what's going on.

 

I don't understand why we still don't have a good solution for AA in Unity (except the SSAA), since we are supposed to make great AAA game...Edit: Like temporal AA (used in Unreal).

 

Aras said this in Feb 2015:

We have people looking into proper "built-in" temporal postprocessing AA solutions here, but that will be post-5.0.​

 

Indeed..

 

AA was always a problem since we got 3d games, Unreal's solution might not be perfect, but it still far better than Unity provides right now. Temporal from this post: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/temporal-anti-aliasing.312525/ is quite blurry but it provides far better specular AA.

 

To get better specular AA what you do is do actual specular AA!
One good way is to use the Toskvig solution, it doesn't "solve" it fully, but it does make uneven things be rough instead of glossy when zoomed out, generally more correct and gets rid of a lot of the specular aliasing issues!
http://blog.selfshadow.com/2011/07/22/specular-showdown/

 

Yep it does work. Thanks

 

I would recomend looking Into Deffered Screen Space Directional Occlusion.I Have Linked A Paper As Well As A Website and an article,for more info:
Paper: https://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~ritschel/Papers/SSDO.pdf
Website: http://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~ritschel/SSDO/
Articles: 1.http://kayru.org/articles/dssdo/ 2.http://www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/136081/1

 

You seem to be very good with ambient occlussion.I'm sure if you include all the features from SSAO Pro to DSSDO
you'll be a millionaire in like 2 seconds.

 

you could use poisson disk samples for better quality-performance ratio.

 

I'm not sure if this is possible, but instead of poisson disk samples you could sample the scene using the golden ratio fibonacci dot pattern as seen below:

vs poisson disk sampling:

you can clearly see a more regular pattern.

 

On Unity 5.2.1f1 SSAO pro does not seem to be working in DX11:

http://i.imgur.com/KZ8PZIY.png