Siggraph 2008: Image-Space Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion

The slides shown below are from the Siggraph 2008 presentation by Louis Bavoil & Miguel Sainz of NVIDIA on HBAO, an innovative improved form of screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO).

A French version of this presentation is also available.

Prefer a printable copy? Click here for a PDF of the presentation slides.

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References cited in this presentation:

• [Max 86] MAX, N. L. 1986. “Horizon mapping: Shadows for bump-mapped surfaces.” In Proceedings of Computer Graphics Tokyo ’86 on Advanced Computer Graphics.
• [Zhukov et al. 98] Sergej Zhukov, Andrej Inoes, Grigorij Kronin, 1998. “An ambient light illumination model.” In Rendering Techniques ’98, G. Drettakis and N. Max, Eds., Eurographics, 45–56.
• [Landis 02] Landis, 2002. “Production-Ready Global Illumination,” In ACM SIGGRAPH Course #16.
• [Christensen 03] Christensen, P. H. 2003. “Global illumination and all that”. In ACM SIGGRAPH Course 9.
• [Eisemann and Durand 04] Elmar Eisemann and Frédo Durand, “Flash Photography Enhancement via Intrinsic Relighting”, ACM SIGGRAPH 2004.
• [Petschnigg et al. 04] Petschnigg, Szeliski, Agrawala, Cohen, Hoppe, Toyama, “Digital photography with flash and no-flash image pairs.” ACM SIGGRAPH 2004.
• [Schüler 05] Christian Schüler, 2005. “Eliminate surface acne with gradient shadow mapping”, ShaderX4: Advanced Rendering Techniques.
• [Gelato] Gritz, L. 2006. “Gelato 2.1 Technical Reference”. NVIDIA.
• [Mental Ray] “mental ray Shader Reference”, November 2007.
• [Mittring 07] MITTRING, M. 2007. “Finding next gen: Cry Engine 2”. In SIGGRAPH ’07: ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 courses.
• [Shanmugam and Orikan 07] SHANMUGAM, P., AND ARIKAN, O. 2007. “Hardware accelerated ambient occlusion techniques on GPUs”. In I3D ’07: Proceedings of the 2007 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games.
• [Kopf et al. 07] Johannes Kopf, Michael F. Cohen, Dani Lischinski, Matt Uyttendaele, “Joint Bilateral Upsampling”, SIGGRAPH '07: ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 papers.
• [Fox and Compton 08] Megan Fox and Stuart Compton, “Ambient Occlusive Crease Shading”, Game Developer Magazine, March 2008.

Other Related links:

• Version Français
• NVIDIA White Paper on Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion
• GDC 2008 Presentation by Miguel Sainz: Real-Time Ambient Occlusion
• Book: Real-Time Rendering by Tomas Akenine-Möller, Eric Haines, and Naty Hoffman, references some related ideas.
• Effects & Techniques in StarCraft II by Dominic Filion and Rob MacNaughton includes a section on screen-space ambient occlusion.