Idea for ambient-occlusion-like effect
The idea of ambient occlusion is that the sky hemisphere is lighting all objects, so the more that any one part of an object is in view of the sky hemisphere, the lighter it will be (and vice versa). Â Crysis popularized a screen-space approximation of this effect, and their implementation seems to resemble soft shadows (projected from the view) with some additional tweaks. Â That got me thinking that using a conventional soft-shadowing approach (with a large kernel blur to approximate VERY soft shadows and a quick falloff) with the light source straight above might produce reasonable AO results. Â I’d like to try this out….