A proof of concept for a simple per-vertex ambient occlusion baking system.
Developed and with Unity 2020.3.16f1 LTS
The mesh processing pipeline consists of the following stages:
- Tesselation - subdivides original geometry to improve the level of detail of per-vertex AO.
- Vertex AO - computes per-vertex ambient occlusion and writes it to vertex colors.
- AO is visualized via a custom Shader Graph (Universal Render Pipeline is used).
- Simplify Mesh - applies adaptive mesh simplification. Depending on the parameters (weights), can lead to significantly fewer triangles in uniform areas and almost no change in detailed areas.
| No AO | AO |
|---|---|
The Sponza scene (shown in .gif in the main section) takes 3.43 seconds to bake on a laptop with AMD Ryzen R7 4800H and Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti.
The scene consists of around 800k triangles.
Most of the steps rely on Compute Shaders and Unity Job System for optimization.
- Works only for models with 1 submesh.
- Topology after mesh simplification is far from ideal.
- Algorithms are mostly naive and not optimized.
Models downloaded from Morgan McGuire's Computer Graphics Archive:
- Serapis Bust
- Crytek Sponza
Models by Quaternius: