VAO++: Practical Volumetric Ambient Occlusion for Games

Abstract

Ambient occlusion is one of the commonly used methods to increase visual fidelity in real-time rendering applications. We propose several extensions of the recently introduced volumetric ambient occlusion method. These extensions improve the properties of the methods with a particular focus on the quality vs performance tradeoff and wide applicability in contemporary games. We describe the implementation of the proposed algorithm and its extensions. We implemented the method as a camera effect within the Unity game engine. The results show that our implementation compares favorably with the standard ambient occlusion in Unity both in terms of quality and speed.