Ambient Occlusion Casting

Baked ambient occlusion is a technique commonly used in rendering technology to simulate soft shadows produced by ambient light. Ambient occlusion enhances the visibility of details and features within a 3D model, improving overall visual quality. By baking it into your materials, you can also enable the rendering of high-fidelity graphics on less powerful systems, including lower-end devices and web platforms.

Simplygon allows you to generate an ambient occlusion map from the original geometry, preserving occlusion details even on your most optimized meshes.

Casting is done with Ambient Occlusion Casters, a material caster created for this purpose. The quality of the ambient occlusion texture can be controlled by setting the number of rays per pixel, as well as the falloff and occlusion multiplier for the rays.

Use cases for Ambient Occlusion Casting include:

• To bake an ambient occlusion map to your highest fidelity model, aka LOD0, while doing material aggregation.
• To generate high-quality optimizations using Remesher on an entire asset library with details preserved in ambient occlusion maps and normal maps. To do this efficiently, you can also distribute the process through Distributed Batch Processing.

To discover how ambient occlusion casters can meet your specific needs, contact us for an evaluation.