World ambient occlusion

Documentation
1

relating to this page, I think we could be more specific.
According to my tests, it seems the World Ambient Occlusion is the equivalent of adding an ambient occlusion node in the existing material and mixing it with the diffuse node using an “Add Shader” and doing so in every material that includes a diffuse (but only mixing with the diffuse).
Side note : it becomes impossible to get the same result with shaders when using a Principled BSDF that is partially diffuse and partially something else that the World Ambient Occlusion doesn’t take into account (e.g. Metallic, SSS, transmission).

Is this interpretation right ?

2

@brecht you are more familiar with the internal workings of this.

3

Ambient occlusion in Cycles is indeed additive, that could be clarified, feel free to submit documentation improvements. I don’t think we should try to explain features like this in terms of how they could be emulated with other features though.