Ambient Occlusion and Sprites?

[bhaveshpandey]

I'm using sprites for rendering dust..The sprites are looking okayish (i guess because of the lighting which I have still not adjusted for it)

what I would love to do rather is to get Abient Occlusion to work with sprites to get good shadows and shade on it..I have worked with Ambient Occlusion and learnt (the hard way ) that it does not quite like intersections and that's is the issue I have at hand..How can we get Sprites and Ambient Occlusion to work with each other?

this is a test render I did with Amb Occ..and this is what I got (which is not surprising)

I did check the ray tracing bias but it did not do much this once ..

Edited September 5, 2009 by bhaveshpandey

[MrGAG]

Hello there,

do you have the same result with 'transparent ambient occlusion' ?

[bhaveshpandey]

hey Guillaume! yep I do get a similar effect using Transparent Amb Occ..

having said that, I should also mention that I said similar because everything is same (the look of sprites) but the Shadow is a tad bit lighter.

I guess even the ray bias wont work..theoretically Sprites work by creating an Illusion of volume because of larger numbers and their orientation to the camera..I guess I'll have to look for some other way

[rd1010]

I'm not sure I understand your approach to this... but I think using transparency maps (with the sprites) may work for what you are trying to accomplish at least based off my interpretation of the render image you posted but I think there are better ways to accomplish the look of dust over an object, for example you can clone the object's surface and then move it up a tiny amount (use the extrude function to do this... I forget which parameter within the extrude does this but it can move it just a fractional amount) then you can use an opacity / transparency map on this new surface along with a displacement map which should be able to give you the effect you are looking for and then this way you can use any sort of shader you want on this layer.

Edited September 6, 2009 by rd1010

[bhaveshpandey]

hey Rick your trick based off extrusion is nice but what i'm trying to get here is dust in air..your trick is more suited to accumulation effect..Although I am starting to think of something similar to experiment with for now..

I did the sprite shader in VEX and it does have Opacity and Alpha defined so I would not attribute this issue to that..(unless i missed something)..

Thanks mate

I'll get back to it later.

Edited September 6, 2009 by bhaveshpandey

[rd1010]

Yeah you're right it might be hard to do to make it seem i the air... but this may work...

take the surface and copy it a few times, each time moving it up a little bit and then apply a few different displacement maps with the transparency map to each one.. this should give a layered surface look to it like its in the air but it depends on how much of this affect you are trying to achieve.