Ambient Occlusion

[Inspirateur]

Ambient Occlusion is the process of darkening areas that are less exposed to diffuse lighting because of the geometry (ex: the corners of a room). In our case it will be a separate process from Global Illumination, which will probably be very crudely approximated on a per-voxel basis.

Ambient Occlusion is much cheaper to get than any kind of GI and greatly enhances the visuals of the game. Minecraft bakes AO into the meshes, but that has the disadvantage of slowing down meshing time considerably and also outputting more quads.

I want to try bevy's SSAO, but it doesn't work outside the box because our Mesh data is compressed, so Bevy cannot find the vertex normals on its own. Thankfully I've been advised that it is still totally doable, I just need to run my own Depth and Normal prepass with custom shaders that will give a correct output to Bevy.