HTrace: Ambient Occlusion combines three of the most popular ambient occlusion techniques into a single asset, offering a highly scalable and adaptive system for AO computation.Includes three AO modes:▪ SSAO (Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion) – A lightweight and extremely fast method for occlusion gathering. It doesn’t require a denoiser and produces zero temporal lag.▪ GTAO (Ground-Truth Ambient Occlusion) – Built on the latest advancements in ambient occlusion research, this technique is highly optimized and refined to deliver the best possible quality in screen-space.▪ RTAO (Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion) – The most accurate occlusion method, utilizing hardware ray tracing for uncompromised quality with scalable performance.Useful Links:FAQDocumentationComparison with native SSAOContact Us:Unity Forum | Discord \ YouTube ChannelMAIN FEATURES:• Full Integration into the Rendering Pipeline: HTrace AO doesn't simply overlay its result on top of the image - it fully replaces the native ambient occlusion effect. The integration happens automatically and doesn't require package customization or manual setup. As a result, it correctly interacts with the rest of the lighting and other effects, and works with both Deferred and Forward rendering.• Scalability: the asset offers three different AO modes, ranging from extremely fast SSAO to highly accurate RTAO, each with its own strength. Choose the one that best suits your performance target or hardware requirements. HTrace AO exposes many parameters for fine-tuning each mode through a clear, user-friendly UI.• Cutting-Edge Screen Tracing: not just a standard GTAO - we carefully gathered all meaningful improvements and optimizations of the technique that emerged over the years since it was first released. It encompasses both big innovations like Visibility Bitmasks as well as a bunch of smaller enhancements to deliver the highest quality screen-space AO currently possible.• Real-Time Ray-Tracing: RTAO mode is packed with all the tools we could come up with to make Ray-Traced AO a practical choice: fast Inline Ray-Tracing, RTAS culling and debugging, Screen-Space Pretracing to cover any mismatch with the rasterized scene, Contact Occlusion for an additional layer of detail, and many more. This mode is built to provide the highest accuracy, without sacrificing performance and usability.• Advanced Denoising: high-end denoising pipeline tailored to each AO mode and built upon our extensive experience and research in this area. Includes 2.5D motion vectors, tracking of moving occlusion, sharp reprojection, anisotropic spatial filtering and other state-of-the-art denoising techniques. Comes with configurable temporal and spatial stages helping you find the right balance of noise reduction and temporal responsiveness for your project.• Resolution Scaling: HTrace AO offers Full, Half and Quarter resolution modes, accompanied by a sharp and optimized upscaler. Designed to reduce the overall effect cost by a factor of 2 or even 4, making them a useful tool to balance quality and performance. RTAO also features a special Adaptive resolution mode: conceptually similar to VRS, it renders areas of the screen with high geometric complexity at full rate and reduces resolution for uniform pixels, automatically adapting to the content.• Extensive Rendering Control: you can exclude objects from casting and/or receiving AO via render layer masks, choose the source of the normals (either from a native buffer or reconstructing them from depth on demand), decide at which point in the pipeline to render AO by selecting an injection point, or even output the result to ShaderGraph for custom material effects. The asset also provides convenient debugging overlays, so you can visually inspect the state of all buffers used by HTrace AO.• Comprehensive Documentation: we provide a detailed description of all properties and settings of the asset, accompanied by visual examples. In our documentation you will find answers to frequently asked questions, in-depth setup guides, comparisons with Unity's native AO solutions, and other useful information. If you have any questions - you can always reach out to us via Discord.HTrace AO supports the following 3rd party assets:DLSS 4.5 | FSR 3-4 | XeSS 3Before buying, please, check the Overview Section and the Known Issues Section of the documentation as well as the Technical details below!Currently supported APIs are: DX11, DX12 and Metal.Currently tested URP versions are: 14 and above.Currently tested Unity versions are: from 2022.2 to 6000.4Limitations and Requirements:RTAO mode requires Unity 6000 or above, a compatible API and hardware.Orthographic Camera is untested and not guaranteed to work correctly.MSAA is untested and not guaranteed to work correctly.Unity LTS releases are recommended; bug fixes for non-LTS versions are not guaranteed.
