The Occlusionist is a spin-off of my Adobe After Effects plug-in Normality and is used to generate screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) and global illumination effects.
So what’s ambient occlusion you ask? Basically, AO is an approximative global illumination method that checks to see whether any given point on a surface is occluded by other surfaces.
Right… now what does that mean?! Well, objects that are close to each other block some of the ambient light which is cast by the sky or the surrounding room, for example. So the more ambient light is blocked in this way, the darker the surface becomes. This creates a nice shadowing effect which can be similar to true global illumination methods.
The effect is commonly used in 3D productions where true GI techniques such as Final Gather or radiosity would be too computationally expensive, whereas AO is comparatively quick to render and does not require a complicated setup.
It’s an incredibly useful tool to give your renders more depth and a more realistic appearance.
Usage
The Occlusionist requires a depth and a normal pass to do its thing. Once you’ve gotten those rendered out of your 3D program of choice it’s pretty straightforward to create ambient occlusion effects: Apply the Occlusionist plug-in, calibrate your normal– and depth pass and there you go — clean (or noisy, as you wish) occlusion effects right in After Effects.
This makes for a wonderful addition to your Normality workflow.
Although AO is fairly quick to render in any modern 3D ray-tracing engine, some of us prefer even faster methods — the reason I developed Normality in the first place!
I hope to get the Occlusionist plug-in close to real-time speed, which will probably require either making it multi-threaded or having it run directly on the GPU.
WIP
At this point the Occlusionist is a work in progress: It’s not at all optimized and requires too many samples to achieve pleasing, noise-free results, which in turn makes the render time a bit too long for my taste. 3 – 5 seconds per frame may be a dream come true from a 3D renderer’s point of view, but in comp that just doesn’t quite cut it.
In the coming weeks I’ll try to get the render-times to a level more on par with what After Effects users are comfortable with.
