Ambient Occlusion

Learn about ambient occlusions in VRED.

For additional information on using Ambient Occlusion, see the following:

Ambient Occlusion OpenGL (Video)

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (Video)

Environments, Ambient Occlusion, and Rendering (Video)

Calculating Ambient Occlusion (How To)

Module vrAmbientOcclusion (Python)

Simple ambient occlusion demo (Python)

Video captions: To get feedback in your render window, you need to activate Wireframe in the toolbar. Ambient occlusion describes the shadowing and self-shadowing of objects. VRED uses pre-calculated ambient occlusion to simulate shadows.

Open the Ambient Occlusion module by selecting the Scene menu, then Ambient Occlusion and select the geometry. Select the preferred quality from the presets in the Direct Illumination section. The better the quality, the more samples that are being calculated. Now, start by using the standard setting, Medium Quality. Through Minimum and Maximum Distance, you can define the area in which the ambient occlusion has to be calculated. For a vehicle calculation, we suggest a setting between 1 and 3000 mm. Start the calculation by selecting Calculate All. OpenGL will immediately show the calculated shadow. Ambient occlusion in VRED is based on vertices. This means that the shadow quality depends on the geometry density.

Open the Subdivisions section. Activate subdivisions with Enable, and select the preferred quality. The better the quality, the purer the geometry gets tessellated. Start by using the standard setting, Low Quality. start a new calculation for the ambient occlusion. Now there will be subdivision in the geometry, where necessary. Now, check the result. If the tessellation wasn't clean enough, redo the tessellation with a higher quality setting.

You can also calculate the ambient occlusion for a selected group. Before you start the calculation, please note that any surrounding geometry will be included in the calculation, so hide it. You should also set the Opacity mode to Solid, if you use a shadow material on the ground. Otherwise, the ground will be regarded as transparent and the geometry will be dimmed down.

Deactivate the subdivisions calculation and start the calculation. Deactivate Wireframe in the toolbar and close the Ambient Occlusion module. Examine the ambient occlusion in the Ambient Occlusion Rendering mode. Note that VRED takes care of glass, automatically. This means that glass covered objects are correctly calculated automatically.