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What is an occlusion map?
An occlusion map is a greyscale image, with white indicating areas that should receive full indirect lighting, and black indicating no indirect lighting. Sometimes this is as simple as a greyscale heightmap. Each pixel stores the height difference perpendicular to the face that pixel represents.
What are Ambient Occlusion maps used for?
In graphics, ambient occlusion is a shadowing technique used to make 3D objects look more realistic by simulating the soft shadows that should naturally occur when indirect or ambient lighting is cast out onto your scene.
What is AO in 3D texture?
An Ambient Occlusion or AO map is a grayscale map which contains lighting data. In 3D engines(both real time and otherwise) most lighting and shadow information in the final displayed image output is taken from the lights used in the scene.
What does AO mean in textures?
Ambient Occlusion
AO (aka Ambient Occlusion) Sometimes you actually want the opposite of the Albedo map: more shadows! So if you want your detail to have more pronounced detail and shadows, you may wish to use the AO map together with your Diffuse or Albedo texture.
What is AO on texture?
An Ambient Occlusion (AO) map creates soft shadowing, as if the model was lit without a direct light source, like on a cloudy day. Typically the AO map is blended into the metalness or specular map, instead of being stored as a unique texture, because this saves memory.
Does ambient occlusion affect performance?
Whilst Ambient Occlusion was once a very demanding process, fine-tuning as well as more powerful GPUs mean AO has a very small impact on performance. You will experience lowered frame rates in certain circumstances but the base AO settings will offer a decent enough visual experience.
Which is better HDAO or SSAO?
H*AO offers better quality but with an increased performance hit. SSAO is less accurate but improves image quality with a much smaller performance penalty. If you’re going to use H*AO, from what I understand you should select HDAO if you have an ATI card or HBAO if you have an nVIDIA card.