So I tried the new ambient occlusion out and I have some mixed feelings about this. It’s missing a lot of the nice contact shadows that one want’s from AO. For example this car, with the AO set to 2m with a factor of 1 in 2.91 I have nice contact shadows under the tires, between the tires and fenders, and behind the number plate. In 2.93 it’s all missing.
I also have this spider, which actually looks worse in 2.91. But it still way more detailed. If I lower the distance to 1m it do looks a bit better again.
2.91
2.93
(I was gonna have one more image here, but for some reason new user are restricted to one embedded file and two links, but yeah, it do look a bit better here)
Don’t know exactly what I can expect with this topic since I don’t really know what’s going on inside the code and what can be done with it. But it would be really nice to have some kind of hybrid between the two maybe, or at least an option to choose the old AO?
A few questions about this commit: https://developer.blender.org/rBdee94afd039d
just to make sure it’s limitation due to screen space effect or because that approximation that is talked about in the commit, and not because a bug.
There is a fresnel-like effect around the edge of the sphere. It does not happen with Cycles.
Also, if you orbit the view the effect varies depending on the point of view and it acts as a camera view dependent effect.
Edit:
The fresnel-like effect is most evident in Orthographic view (as it is by default in that .blend example), but even in Perspective view it looks different than Cycles on the edges/sphere boundaries.
