The Alchemy Screen Space Ambient Obscurance

Abstract

Achieving a global illumination in real time has always been the interest of computer graphics where the need for approximations for rendering realistic scenes taking into account all kinds of interactions between light sources and objects of the scene or objects between themselves. We are interested in one of the methods used to approximate the global illumination which is the ambient occlusion that generates soft shadows in places with low light contribution to improve the realism of the scene. Although it has excellent results for approximating global illumination, it is not practical to use when real time is required because it depends on geometry in its calculations. Alchemy Ambient Obscurance Method on the other hand is considered to be one of several solutions for approximating ambient obscurance which is an extended version of ambient occlusion using screen space. This method has effective results in real time, it causes a low performance, gives noisy results without speaking about ignorance of the important contributions of the scene. The goal of this project is to implement the original Alchemy Ambient Obscurance Technique, to improve performance by using different filtering techniques rather than the original and to improve the samples by performing a comparative study between the different techniques of sampling to produce realistic and acceptable results.