Increase Ambient Occlusion in Normal Map Decal

Development Rendering
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Hi,

I’ve set up a simple decal material for my floating normal maps. I’ve been playing around with the ambient occlusion because I’d like it to be much darker. I know this is harder to simulate now because directional light is supposed to be reaching in there. But the panel lines which they are supposed to represent look really weak and I’d like them to stand out more when looking at the object.

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image1532×673 101 KB

Following one of William Fauchers videos, he recommends to turn off Allow Static Lighting in the project settings, however I’m not sure I’ve seen any difference in my current set up.

I’m currently using a spotlight to light my scene and a skylight with a HDR.

Thank you for any help at all :slight_smile:

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Something I’ve found that works well, is to put this

image
image237×216 36.9 KB

into the actual material, and use it with a power node to reduce the lightness of the albedo. You can lerp between unaffected albedo, and albedo with a power node applied

AO

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Apologies for the delay in replying.

Thank you very much for the suggestion. I’ve had a play around, but I can’t seem to get any combination of using these nodes to work as I believe you’ve suggested. The whites of the material are very strong and I can’t seem to understand how to tone them down. Is it correct I have them plugged into the base color? I’ve not yet plugged the lerp back in as I was trying to understand how it should work first.

Many thanks,

image
image1476×518 71.6 KB

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Sorry, no, you use one pin of the texture to lerp between two things

  • the albedo

  • the powered albedo

I’m at a machine a bit later, I will show it… :slight_smile:

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Like this

image
image978×727 125 KB

I noticed the blue channel needed the kind of mask I wanted, so I use it to lerp between the default albedo, and the albedo with the power applied. I can also tweak the power.

Power of 1 is no effect, and anything between .5 and 1.5 can be good.

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Thank you so much again for the reply. I’ve spent another good few hours playing around but I think the solution I’m trying to resolve is slightly different as I’m using a deferred decal material which is just supposed to blend the normal texture over the top of the existing materials. This is working exactly as intended, but as I mentioned ambient occlusion seems to do absolutely nothing.

If I use the material in a way like you have kindly suggested so far, then the whites of the ambient occlusion overlay on top of my materials like I shared in my previous image.

Just not sure how to achieve what I’d like :confused:

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There’s a thread here about ‘actual’ AO, but it doesn’t look too hopeful

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Thank you again for all your help.

In the end, this is simply what I used.

r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.SSAO 1
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ShortRangeAO 0

I’m not 100% what they do, I’ll have to look into it. But for now. It worked :slight_smile:

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:smiley: