Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion using OPTIX

Bachelor-Thesis

Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) is a very interesting method to fake global illumination effects with very little computational cost. It works very well for fine surface details and is used both for content creation and interactive rendering in computer games.
SSAO is a post-processing effect and works by interpreting the depth-buffer of the current image as height field. For each point the global visibility is approximated by tracing rays into this height field. If the depth value in the depth-buffer is smaller than the depth of the ray, the direction of the ray is considered occluded and the color of the pixel is darkened. Currently this tracing happens in elaborate fragment shaders.
After gaining an overview over existing SSAO techniques, the main task of this thesis is use OPTIX, the new GPU ray tracer of NVIDIA for tracing rays for SSAO. After determining the performance of such a setup, potential next steps are to to explore ways to improve the quality of SSAO by using multiple layers (depth-peeling) or the complete geometry generated for a given frame by on-the-fly tessellation.

Advisor(s)

• Dr.-Ing. Christian Eisenacher
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Marc Stamminger