Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012)

# Summary Sean Barrett argues that screenspace ambient occlusion (SSAO), a popular rendering technique in games, produces unrealistically dark corners because developers mistakenly believe corners are actually darker in the real world. Using photographs from a physical Cornell box, he demonstrates that corners typically aren't as dark as SSAO renders them, attributing the visual discrepancy to approximation errors, incorrect application of darkening to all lighting rather than just ambient light, and over-tuned weighting in the SSAO algorithm.