Ambient Occlusion in UE 5.2.1

Hi, can someone please help me find a fix for my problem. I have created a Virtual Set in Cinema 4D which I have imported in the Film/Video & Live Events template. After going through some videos and write ups, I am still not able to figure out how to get Ambient Occlusion. I also tried the method shown in the video

but not much of help.

The video itself makes sense, but I suppose the more pertinent question is, what makes you want AO?

Fundumentally, ambient occlusion is a nice-looking but nonphysical hack. It paints in shadows into corners, but it’s missing out on a ton of light transport behavior because occlusion in the real world is never ambient. AO doesn’t account for how light really bounces or propagates through a scene, and UE’s SSAO implementation is particularly flawed: the screen space nature means constant artifacting and that very bad ‘outline effect’.

If you’re doing virtual set work, I would stay clear from AO if you have the performance headroom to use lumen. Lumen is more or less radiometrically accurate to the real-world, whereas it would be pretty obvious where footage would end and the game world would begin with SSAO.

If you’re looking to get a series of passes to work with, I would use the lumen CVars: you can have visualizations for diffuse indirect lighting, reflections, and manage a lot of the lighting phenomenon it uses.

I have a few different shaders available:

Thanks for your reply. Cheers!! :slightly_smiling_face:

So, you’re using SSAO to drive shader output? That’s a situation I wouldn’t be too sure of then, as I don’t know what sort of behavior you’re using ambient occlusion to drive- I did take a look at your shader videos though.

Are you using AO to drive shaders, or just looking for good scene lighting?

The shaders you see there are using a combination of AO buffer pass and some math to get the effects like banding, gradients, and so on.