stonemason opened this issue on May 12, 2008 · 62 posts
bagginsbill posted Tue, 13 May 2008 at 1:58 PM
Ghonma: It is a limitation of Poser as it is now, but why on earth would you say it's the same in every other renderer? Because it certainly is NOT the same in Kerkythea, WHICH IS FREE, so you can try it and see.
*There's no way around this as AO is calculated purely by 'touching' objects around each pixel and not calling their shaders.
*There most certainly is a way around it - you just said it - AO should involve the shader transparency channel if it is in use. This is a pretty simple thing to do, and it is exactly what is done by the ray-tracing directional shadow generator. There's no reason why the AO shadow generator cannot send its ray out and query the shader at the intersection point.
Look at what a beautiful, incredible job PPro did with this transmapped square. There are points that are 95% transparent, 50% transparent, and 0% transparent. Click for full size and observe the lovely distance-based blurring and the half-dark shadow from the little rectangles.
The shadow is raytraced with blur, not depth-mapped. Clearly the raytraced shadow uses the transparency information perfectly. There is no excuse why the AO shadow algorithm should not do the same.
I've filed a bug with SM on this.
Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)