SSAO Pro - High Quality Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion

Community Showcases
1

SSAO Pro offers a high-quality, stable and fast version of SSAO for Unity with added features like lighting contribution, distance cutoff with smooth falloff and occlusion color.

Asset Store | Itch.io
Documentation | Website

SSAO (short for Screen-space ambient occlusion) approximates ambient occlusion in realtime. It relies on the depth and normals buffers to darkens creases, holes and surfaces that are close to each other. In real life, such areas tend to block out or occlude ambient light, hence they appear darker.

High Quality
Adds a whole new visual dimension to your scenes using a stable and powerful algorithm.

Optimized
Quality settings, downsampling levels, variable blur quality… Fine-tune the effect to your needs !

Customizable
Wide or sharp radius, intensity, occlusion distance and color, distance falloff… Plenty of settings to tweak !

Full source code included.

Regarding performances compared to Unity’s SSAO using the highest possible quality (LC = Lighting Contribution, DC = Distance Cutoff) :

  • SSAO Pro (High, LC & DC enabled, Downsampling: 1, No Blur) : 0.998ms

  • SSAO Pro (High, LC & DC enabled, Downsampling: 1, Bilateral Blur) : 1.290ms

  • SSAO Pro (High, LC & DC enabled, Downsampling: 2, Bilateral Blur) : 0.507ms

  • Unity SSAO (High, Downsampling: 1, Blur: 0) : 1.130ms

  • Unity SSAO (High, Downsampling: 1, Blur: 1) : 1.692ms

  • Unity SSAO (High, Downsampling: 2, Blur: 1) : 0.990ms

Lower is better. Please note that these numbers will vary from computer to computer depending on their specs.

I also made a quick speed/quality comparison using a variety of setting combinations. You can find it in this post.

Unity 4.5+ Pro or Unity 5.0+ (Personal or Pro) is required. Tested on desktop platforms (DirectX 9, DirectX 11, OpenGL). Although it could potentially work with OpenGL ES 2.0 and 3.0, I wouldn’t recommend using this on mobile devices. It’s a high-end effect, the performance cost would be too expensive for these platforms to handle at a smooth framerate. Even though the shader used in this asset is quite optimized, SSAO in itself still is an expensive effect and requires a powerful computer to run at very high settings.

Models & Textures in screenshots and video by Manufactura K4 and Unity Technologies (not included in the package).

3 Likes
2

Version 1.0.2 is available !

Changelog (1.0.2) :

  • Added a new quickstart launcher when you import or update SSAO Pro.

  • Added “About SSAO Pro” and “SSAO Pro Manual” in the Help menu.

  • Fixed : The effect wasn’t working properly in DirectX mode using the forward rendering path and MSAA.

  • Misc : Various documentation fixes & additions.

Don’t forget to rate it on the Asset Store :wink:

3

I’d be interested if I had pro yet, unfortunately I don’t.

But SSAO is a pretty good effect that can help build scene depth a lot. It’s hard to see in still shots sometimes but just imagine any protruding geometry at all in your scene getting more shadow data… I personally like the feature a lot in games so good on you for developing this.

4

very nice, any future plans to do HBAO plugin?

5

HBAO, no, because it’s a fair bit slower than SSAO (which is already quite expensive) so not really worth it.

HBAO+… Maybe, I need to look into it but can’t promise anything. I’m actually quite happy with the results I’m getting with SSAO Pro. But yeah, maybe in the future I’ll dig into HBAO+.

Edit: btw, if anyone is able to find a paper about HBAO+ I’d love to see it because at the moment it’s nowhere to be seen. I hope it won’t be another secret driver-only implementation, like TXAA…

6

Is there a comparisson with pics to Unity SSAO ?

7

No, I will try to post some tomorrow so you can see the difference in quality (speed is in the first post) !

8

Could you post a web player perhaps?

9

Nice, thanks

10

It looks great. Is there anyway to bake the results for use on mobile?

11

I doubt it, thats like asking if you can bake DOF.

12

I was afraid it was a silly question. I get the part where the SS in the name prevents it from baking. But I also can’t come up with a good reason for it to be dynamic? It’s not clear to me from the video and the copy what the use-case is of this?

13

Animated objects and characters ? Moving lights (this SSAO effect takes lighting into consideration) ? :stuck_out_tongue:

If you only want static AO, you can of course bake it using 3dsmax, Maya or anything else but that’s not what this asset is about.

So, I tried to get the highest quality I could from the default SSAO to do a comparison, but as the algorithms used aren’t the same it wasn’t easy. Here you go :

(left) SSAO Pro | Unity SSAO (right)

As you can see, SSAO Pro is better at finding small creases, details in normal and parallax maps. It’s more precise in general. It’s also faster, as shown the first post. And, in this case, the SSAO Pro screenshots don’t even have the blur pass activated (less GPU stress, two draw calls saved, almost twice as fast as the screenshots with the default SSAO) and it looks good already :slight_smile:

1 Like
14

very nice, cant wait to try it out.

15

It looks super fine, and its very nicely priced. Bookmarked and watching.

16

Of course, but the examples you’ve shown so far have been static; no moving lights either. That’s why I asked.

17

Indeed, my fault, because it’s the best way to showcase SSAO :slight_smile: Some actually have animations and moving lights but it’s a bit hard to see in such a short time with a moving camera.

I’ll try to post a demo using an animated character when I get the chance !

18

Thanks a lot for the comparissons, your system seems godly :slight_smile:

Do you plan to increase on price later ? Just to know when to buy :), which is already in the asap region with such amazing results.

Another thing, i saw you mention a parameter about distance cut off, is this something Unity Pro SSAO provides as well or os unique to your system ?

19

No price increase planned at the moment. I have a small list of features I’d like to add or improve to make it more complete, but nothing that would justify a price bump.

20

what kind of features?