The new free version is pending review, a link to the Asset Store page will be here when it’s approved.
Sonic Ether’s Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SESSAO) is an image effect for Unity 5.4 and up that approximates soft contact shadows to bring a lighting phenomenon seen in the real world to your scenes. Not only is it algorithmically unique and flexible, it includes a “color bleeding” feature not seen in other SSAO solutions that can further improve the quality of your scenes. Its quality to performance cost ratio is much higher than built-in Unity SSAO and many other SSAO algorithms.
SESSAO is plug-and-play. Simply add the image effect to your main camera and that’s it! It is compatible with Forward, Deferred, and Legacy Deferred rendering paths, DX9 and DX11, and works with any shaders (including Alloy shaders). This image effect is not compatible with mobile devices.
Please refer to the included User Guide for details on how to use this asset.
Definitely excited to try this with my current game Megatect. AO is integral to the art style and if I can get half the performance from this as seen above i’ll be overjoyed!
It’s coming along steadily. I’ve got quite a few ideas for it that I’d like to try implementing soon. I want to make sure the release of SESSAO is as stable and bug-free as possible first, though. Immediately following that, I will update SENBDL. Then I can focus on GI. Oh, and you called it “SSGI”, if you meant “screen-space global illumination”, let me clarify that my GI solution is not a screen-space effect. Illuminated surfaces not seen in the view frustum still cast indirect light.
Yep, there’s a bit of tonemapping on there to reduce ugly color clipping. Keep in mind that what you’re looking at is the CPU profiler, the real performance draw is going to be on the GPU. When I mentioned quality to performance hit ratio in the OP, I wanted to convey that this was my main focus for this asset. If you crank up Unity’s included SSAO in an attempt to try to get it looking as good as SESSAO, you’ll notice that Unity’s SSAO takes over 2x the performance hit as SESSAO while still not quite achieving the same image quality. Unity’s SSAO is quite fast at default settings, but in my opinion, it’s unusable at those settings because of how bad it looks. SESSAO is quite scalable (with downsampling, half-sampling, disabling color bleeding, etc.), but perhaps I’ll consider including a completely separate approach to emphasize speed in a future update if people still find performance cost to be an issue.
Thanks for letting me know, guys. I do not own a Mac, so I can’t quite test this myself. I’d like to find a fix for this immediately. I’ll try changing a few things and post some additional web player demos, it would mean a lot to me if you guys could take a look at those when I post them and let me know whether color bleeding is working or not.
@sonicether No problem, just post them here and I’ll have a look. Try posting a standalone as well. In Ludum Dare I noticed a few differences between Web Players and standalones on Mac. Differences I hadn’t noticed before, mainly because I don’t develop on my Mac. And seeing as the Web Player is a dying breed you may as well.
you know …