So I like long Lightmass builds and the beautiful AO it naturally gives, but I need something so that my movable objects don’t look so starkly flat. I’ve looked a bit into DFAO, and I’m still toying with the idea of adding that extra memory cost for all my objects. But SSAO is fairly cheap, right? Is there a way I can mask it off for only specific objects so that the blotchy halos don’t override the majority of a nicely lit, static scene. I’ve never really messed with any Custom Depth things or post process materials.
And feel free to recommend alternatives and educate me on DFAO in terms of performance. This is meant to be a VR project.
DFAO is for AO from the environment so not applicable to what you want. SSAO operates on everything because it is done deferred.
In some of our VR demos we faked soft contact shadows from the sky with a blob shadow - IIRC it’s just a translucent ellipsoid mesh that darkens under the objects.
In the future we hope to have an actual feature for this, where you setup capsules on the skeletal mesh and then soft shadows are rendered from those.
Well cant you actually do that already by attaching capsule static meshes on your mesh, making the base mesh not casting shadow and let the capsules cast with DFRS?
I didn’t test this yet but sounds like it could work at least on projected shadows. Making that work with self shadowing is another matter though.