Houdini 20.0 Nodes Geometry nodes

Labs Calculate Occlusion 2.0 geometry node

Vertex Based Ambient Occlusion Calculation

This node type is hidden. It is no longer supported.
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Ambient Occlusion is a common operation where areas that are self occluded become darker. Traditionally this is done as a rendering step, but we've added this node to do it at the geometry level.

This is very handy for doing several biased operations, like choosing the cost for a shortest path algorithm, biasing less poly reduction on occluded areas or increasing scatter density.

Inputs

Object To Recieve Occlusion

First Input, object to operate on.

Optional Occlusion Object

Additional Input that contributes to the occlusion calculation, but is not added to the geometry. Like an invisible shadow caster

Parameters

Occlusion Settings

Number of Rays

How many samples to generate. Higher number means higher quality at the cost of speed.

Bias

Shifts the value fo the output, similar to an intensity sliders, but values closer to 0 means a stronger AO

Advanced

Maximum Ray Distance

Stop the AO Ray from going beyond this distance. Useful for removing artifacts of AO happening because of a far away object.

Cone Width

How wide is the sampling, smaller numbers means tighter falloffs.

Output

Output Occlusion as Color ( Cd )

Toggle for the Occlusion to be written to the Cd (color) channel on Points.

Occlusion Attribute

If the above value is off, this is the override name for the output attribute.

Output curve

This curve lets you do basic levels operations on the AO to fine tune the results without needing to rerun the expensive AO calculations.

Smoothing

Method

Lets you choose the different blurring methods

Influence Type

This parameter determines how points see their neighbors

Blurring Iterations

Number of times the input geometry is blurred

Blur Size

Size of each blurring iteration.

Geometry nodes