Screen-space Bent Cones: A Practical Approach

Ambient occlusion (AO) is a popular technique to visually improve both real-time as well as offline rendering. It decouples occlusion and shading providing a gain in efficiency. This results in an average occlusion that modulates the surface shading. However, this also reduces realism due to the lack of directional information.. Bent normals were proposed as an amelioration that addresses this issue for offline rendering. Here, we describe how to compute bent normals as a cheap by-product of screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO). Bent cones extend bent normals to further improve realism. These extensions combine the speed and simplicity of AO with physically more plausible lighting

@InBook { KRES12,
  author       = "Klehm, Oliver and Ritschel, Tobias and Eisemann, Elmar and Seidel, Hans-Peter",
  title        = "Screen-space Bent Cones: A Practical Approach",
  chapter      = "Global Illumination Effects",
  series       = "GPU Pro",
  pages        = "191--207",
  year         = "2012",
  publisher    = "CRC Press",
  note         = "ISBN: 978-1439887820",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2012/KRES12"
}