I’ve gone through like 4 different videos explain ambient occlusion and I still have no clear image of what it actually means to add ambient occlusion to an image.
I watch Sinix and he always mentions ambient occlusion but I have no idea what he means when he says that. Someone please explain to me in words less than 4 syllables.
In: 1
It’s a measure of how much ambient light falls on a surface in a scene. Or to be more exact, how much ambient light is blocked (occluded) from that surface.
So if you have 2 people in an outdoor scene, one standing in direct sunlight and the other in the shade under a tree, the second figure will have less ambient light falling on it and so will have to be shaded darker.
Things close more shadow.
The closer things are, the stronger the space between is occluded from everything else, and thus the more in shadow that space is.
Consider a tube pointing straight up on an overcast day. If it’s a thin tube, you wont be able to see the inside of the tube because it is in such a strong shadow. If it’s a wide tube (like an arms length), you will be able to see the inside of the tube. This also applies to other things, like sharp corners or the floor under tables for example.
Ambient occlusion simulates the way that objects are exposed to *ambient* lighting.
*Ambient* lighting is different than *direct* lighting. Take sunshine as an example: the direct source of light is the sun. Because the rest of the sky isn’t black, there’s additional *ambient* lighting coming from the entire sky.
Or indoors, the direct lighting would be coming from light bulbs, the ambient lighting would be coming from the light that’s bouncing off walls and objects.
Because this ambient light is coming from a large source (walls or the sky) then the shadows it casts are very soft and have no direction. This is as opposed to hard Shadows from a light bulb or the sun that have a distinct edge to them and fall in a specific direction.
Occlusion means being blocked. Before games used ambient occlusion, the game would assume that all areas had a certain amount of ambient lighting. Ambient occlusion takes the blocking of light into account, so that it better emulates real life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion
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