Ambient occlusion
In this section, we'll investigate ambient occlusion further, even though we already talked about it briefly in Chapter 4, Non-Physical Rendering. We'll activate ambient occlusion (often initialized as AO) and then talk about some important values to change. Let's get started:
- Go to the Render Properties and check the box next to Ambient Occlusion.
- You should see immediately that the rocks close to the camera become darker where they occlude with other rocks. Ambient occlusion is basically shadowing that we take for granted in real work but can be very computationally heavy in a rendering engine. In EEVEE, we approximate it so that we can see it in real time.
Refer to Figure 7.16 to see the properties available to tweak for Ambient Occlusion in the Render Properties panel. The...