GPU Gems 3

Chapter 12. High-Quality Ambient Occlusion

Jared Hoberock University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Yuntao Jia University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Ambient occlusion is a technique used in production to approximate the effect of environment lighting. Unlike the dull, flat look of local lighting models, ambient occlusion can add realism to a scene by accentuating small surface details and adding soft shadows. Bunnell 2005 demonstrated a novel technique for approximating this effect by integrating occlusion with an adaptive traversal of the hierarchical approximation of a model. While this technique does a good job of approximating smoothly varying shadows, it makes assumptions about the input model that make it not robust for general high-quality ...