Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion is another new feature in TerraformFX.

Ambient Occlusion examples with different Radius values.

In practice, with TerraformFX, Ambient Occlusion and Curvature can be used for similar purposes, but they are fundamentally different.

While Curvature is a direct analysis of the immediate terrain topology, Ambient Occlusion can be regarded as a probability map that depends on the surrounding terrain.

This might make it more suitable for distributing things that - in reality - depend on the lightness of an area, e.g. grass, or that would probably accumulate in depressions, e.g. sand in ravines and gullies.

Ambient Occlusion is available as a parameter in the Terrain Texture Layer type, as well as in the dedicated Ambient Occlusion Texture Layer type and in the new tfDistribute operator.

It is also available in the Terrain Operator Shader.