Depth SSAO in LWRP almost working, not sure exactly how to apply it

Unity Engine
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1

From novice tinkering and reading tons of posts and papers I have a really simple depth-based SSAO working in LWRP.
Evidently the shader works! And by adding a custom forward renderer and putting stuff on layers I can see it as a pass.(Image 1)

The parts I can’t understand are:

  1. It only works if I put a plane between the camera and the scene! If I remove the plane, the scene is sort… of projected onto the geometry itself. (Image 2)
    Scaling this plane in X-Y scales the entire rendered image on it with the AO.

  2. How would I composite this over the actual real scene? I was planning on scaling this working plane to fit the camera and altering the shader to be additive or darkening. Or blitting the result…?
    Thank you, I’m having a lot of fun learning this.

5826655--617632--AO1.jpg
5826655--617632--AO1.jpg1600×860 254 KB
5826655--617635--AO2.jpg
5826655--617635--AO2.jpg1600×860 317 KB

2

Have you checked the URP rendering examples?

There should be full-screen rendering example (outline) and it uses depth too so you can get an example from there.

3

Just to confirm, it’s doable that way - I just tried it this afternoon, converted my old depth-using post-processing effect to URP.