Broken SSAO

drayko

This is what the SSAO effect looks like for me since I have a current computer, i.e. several years. Since then, I have updated the system and drivers many times. Instead of a shadow, I have a mesh that looks unnatural when the camera moves, it looks more like a filter on the screen. So far I have not bothered about it, but now when I try my hand at creating games it is a big obstacle. The same is when there is a fade of objects in games, e.g. when we bring the camera closer to a unit until it disappears, the effect is not transparent, but in the form of a black grid.

Windows 7 GeForce GTX 750 Ti

cybereality

You can try adjusting the SSAO settings in the inspector, but I don't think it will help much. It's probably not your computer, the effect is just kind of low quality in Godot. I ended up just turning it off since it doesn't look great and uses a ton of performance. It's been rewritten in Godot 4.0, so should be better whenever that comes out.

drayko

"not your computer," it's been like this for me for years in most games inspector gave me 0 effect, maybe my card is damaged? "I ended up just turning it off" but without it the facilities look "dry". Can you recommend any materials with tips on how to get a nice effect without SSAO?

Megalomaniak

It's screen-space AO hence the 'flatness' and it's dithered hence the 'grid' look.

drayko

I don't understand a word

cybereality

This is the look I got with using baked lightmaps in Godot 3.2.4. Looks better than the SSAO and doesn't kill performance.

cybereality

Here is the same scene plus SSAO, you can see it looks bad even on my computer (2080Ti)

Megalomaniak

@Megalomaniak said: It's screen-space AO hence the 'flatness' and it's dithered hence the 'grid' look.

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@drayko said: I don't understand a word

https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/courses/Realtime/slides/VU.WS.2014/12Screenspace_effects.pdf Screen space effects are essentially 2D so how can they be anything but flat?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither

Calinou

The new SSAO coming to Godot 4.0 is based on Intel's ASSAO and looks much better. It could be backported to Godot 3.2.x's GLES3 renderer but it's not an easy task. In the meantime, try decreasing the AO intensity and increase the SSAO quality in the Environment if you can afford it.

That said, keep in mind that screen-space ambient occlusion will always look worse than baked ambient occlusion for anything that's not small details.