Ambient Occlusion for Animated Characters

Abstract

We present a novel technique for approximating ambient occlusion of animated objects. Our method automatically determines the correspondence between animation parameters and per-vertex ambient occlusion using a set of reference poses as its input. Then, at runtime, the ambient occlusion is approximated by taking a dot product between the current animation parameters and static per-vertex coefficients. According to our results, both the computational and storage requirements are low enough for the technique to be directly applicable to computer games running on current graphics hardware. The resulting images are also significantly more realistic than the commonly used static ambient occlusion solutions.