Contents

Ambient Occlusion

 

The Ambient Occlusion maps within Knald are generated one the fly from the Normal & Height Maps provided by The Integrator. They are adjustable in real time and produce extremely high quality and clean results that rival baked AO at 600+ rays.

 

Even bakes from multi-million polygonal meshes that can take almost 30 minutes in other modern GPU baking tools take only 2-3 minutes in Knald.**
 
By harnessing the power of 64bit and modern GPUs, Knald can even generate Mesh AO from UV mapped multi-million polygonal meshes with only your amount of VRAM limiting your potential! Want to use a 10 million triangle mesh straight from your sculpting application of choice? No problem! As long as your GPU has sufficient VRAM you are good to go!
 
When used with our Concavity, Convexity & Image based AO, you may never need to “bake” another AO map again!

 

Ambient Occlusion settings

 

AO Scale: The strength of the image based AO, irrespective of the Global Intensity slider.

Mesh AO: This check box is a toggle to enable and disable Low Poly Ambient Occlusion via an imported mesh.

Opacity: The level of opacity used when mixing the Low Poly Ambient Occlusion with the image based Ambient Occlusion.

Rays: This slider is used to determine the number of samples in a discrete evaluation of the integral across the half sphere for diffuse outgoing radiance with a constant radiance field with a minimum of 256 and maximum of 8192 rays being available. A higher number or rays will increase the quality of the Low Poly Ambient Occlusion at the cost of speed. We do not recommend going below a value of 512 rays as this can cause banding to appear in the map. A value of 1024-2048 or above should be perfect for production.

Bias: A bias value based upon mesh density. A value of 10 should be good in most situations.