I3D 2019: High-Quality Object-Space Dynamic Ambient Occlusion for Characters

Posted April 9, 2019

Download the paper and watch the presentation video: https://www.ea.com/seed/news/i3d2019-...

The widely used ambient occlusion (AO) technique provides an approximation of some global illumination effects and is efficient enough for use in real-time applications. Because it relies on computing the visibility from each point on a surface, AO computation is expensive for dynamically deforming objects, such as characters in particular.

In this paper, we describe an algorithm for producing high-quality dynamically changing AO for characters. Our fundamental idea is to factorize the AO computation into a coarse-scale component in which visibility is determined by approximating spheres, and a fine-scale component that leverages a skinning-like algorithm for efficiency, with both components trained in a regression against ground-truth AO values. The resulting algorithm accommodates interactions with external objects and generalizes without requiring carefully constructed training data. Extensive comparisons illustrate the capabilities and advantages of our algorithm.

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