Ambient Occlusion not working with flipped sprites

Unity Engine
1

Greetings!
I’m currently using the Ambient Occlusion effect from Unity’s Post Processing Stack in a 2D game.

The problem is, AO works fine on normal sprites:
(AO by the character’s feet),
but isn’t workking on flipped sprites:

(I’m using localScale.x *= -1 to flip the characters. I’ve also tried using the flipX option of SpriteRenderer but no luck :(.)

The shader I’m using is the Pixel Lit sprite shader from Unity Sprite Uber Shader. Lighting, shadows even DOF seem fine, only AO.

Any suggestions? I suppose I should rewrite the shader to make it somehow double sided but I’m not sure how…Many thanks in advance!

2

Im guessing the geometry is flipped and its now showing the back face of the sprite mesh, and perhaps the ambient occlusion doesn’t use the back faces?

anyway… trying to use ambient occlusion which is a 3d effect with sprites which are fundamentally 2d is bound to produce issues.

3

Thank you for your reply and I totally agree with you. It took me quite some time to get the 3d fx (lighting, shadows and depth of field) working, but I think it’s worth it since the game looks quite interesting with them!
And I actually just found a workaround the problem I posted…the Multi-Scale Volumetric AO from Unity’s latest Post Processing Stack v2 actually works for sprites!