Voxel-space ambient occlusion

Abstract : Ambient occlusion adds important detail to a scene. This paper presents a multiresolution screen-space voxel based ambient occlusion technique, which improves G-buffer based techniques, avoiding artifacts such as haloing. Our technique is scalable to the level-of-detail desired by the user. Because we assume voxels to be small objects, we compute ambient occlusion using an area rendering equation based formulation. As ambient occlusion changes smoothly across a scene, we use a stencil based screen-space multiresolution buffer to refine and render multiple resolution images. Curvature and depth discontinuity metrics to identify appropriate sampling rates.