Ambient Occlusion

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Ambient Occlusion is a post process rendering technique that darkens the edges, corners and the like to make assets appear like they are reacting light more realistically. There are multiple different rendering techniques to achieve Ambient Occlusion, Unreal 4 using Screen Space Ambient Occlusion or SSAO. Using this technique means that normal maps in materials will also have an effect on the final look. Like any additional rendering technique Ambient Occlusion comes with a performance resource cost. You can adjust the intensity of the effect as well as the radius of the effect. Most AAA games use ambient occlusion to help make their assets blend in more with each other and create a more realistic scene as a whole.



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