Experimenting with SSAO a bit… One of the problem of our SSAO is that it has to render an additional geometry pass to render the normals in a buffer to compute ssao.
I recently experimented a way to approximate the normals from the depth texture and it’s an ok technique but it’s a lot less accurate, and also reveals the flat faces of the models in the normal map… but… since SSAO has an additional blur pass at the end… I thought it might be ok :p.
No SSAO
Classic SSAO with the additional geometry pass
SSAO with approximated normals
The classic SSAO looks a bit better… but the approximation is 50% faster… can be a nice optimization option for your scenes…
All this in master you can now use ssaoFilter.setApproximateNormals(true) to use it. Default is to false.