Man I'm burnt out. Ya know, burnt to a crisp. Yet I keep on working towards my vision.

*posts screenshots of gameplay*

;-)

Anyways, a graphics technique has recently caught my eye, I saw the IOTD here, and I remember reading about it in the Crytek paper...'Screen Space Ambient Occlusion' [ SSAO ]. It is an interesting screen-space algorithm that in theory generates ambient occlusion data based off the depth [ and maybe the normals ] of the scene, the Crytek paper is frustratingly sparce on information...so I relied on the description in the IOTD and there was another source out there [ just google for SSAO ], which has some good info.

I decided to spend a few hours playing around with it, to see what it could get me. I was disapointed with my results...constant banding issues, bleeding of shadowing off objects, and depth value issues I'm too busy to spend hours working on.

Though I did stumble across the beginnings of a toon-shading algorithm of some kind...actually it's basically just edge detection with some fudged ambient occlusion, but still...I thought it looks interesting and could maybe give me a fresh visual direction to go in.

Just food for thought...one of the 100 things I'm juggling right now...I'm not interested [ or allowed? ] to post day to day progress on the game anymore...so I'm just going to post things like this every so often.

Anyways...down to the screenshots.

First off...here are 2 new weapons for the game [ remember there are 30 total ].





Now down to the SSAO -

Here is a screengrab from the Crytek paper. How SSAO is supposed to look.


My two failed attempts...after an hour or so...



Now the fun stuff...I stumbled accross this...[Ignore the frame-rates...I'm rendering all the other aspects of the scene as well as the SSAO, they're just not visible.] Plus my new monitor @ 2560x1600 kinda slows windowed apps down with 20 other things running in the background on my measly 8800GTS.
Final composite...on a car.

Raw output of the early toon/hand drawn look...








Inputs into the algorithm...
Depth

Normals


That is all.

- Danny