( previously discussed over there, but for clarity moved here. )
there’s this very efficient global illumination technique out in the wild called ‘Ambient Occlusion’. it is successfully implemented in a bunch of games now and you can find a lot of code samples on the web.
as far as i can tell, screen spaced AO is the way to go, as dyanamic AO is even harder to implement. some links:
it would be wonderful to have this bleeding edge realtime render technique in vvvv. should work with easily with 30fps on a recent graphic card. i’m absolutely not into shaders, so could only go a few steps with the help of a friend.
there’s also a fake ambient occlusion technqiue that is a lot cheaper but faster and easier to write. it’s called ‘Depth Darkening’ and described here.
we’ve started to write a hlsl shader for it. the first results look like this:
so it somehow works but there are still problems with the edges etc. i’ve atteched the code, maybe some of the shader cracks can have a look at it, so a working DD shader would be a first start to have SSAO some day. horray.
DepthDarkening.zip (11.0 kB)