Shadows and SSAO : III

» Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:35 am

Hey all, just reinstalled Morrowind on a new machine and I am curious about the current state of shadows/ssao. I originally was using knu's ssao shader which is great accept it doesn't behave too well with transparent textures(mainly hair and grass). Is there any way to tweak the ssao shader to possibly be less aggresive?

Also are there any problems(other than fps drop) of the "use high detailed shadows" option in the ini settings? Does anyone use this option?

Or should I just wait until there is a more stable version of Hrnchand's MGE?

» Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:28 am

You can disable the SSAO in exterior with a flag option in MGE.

» Mon Mar 14, 2011 2:30 pm

You can disable the SSAO in exterior with a flag option in MGE.

That's probably a good idea except you still get crazy shadowy errors when using characters with transparencies in their hair no?

» Mon Mar 14, 2011 1:48 pm

ah! I don't know.

» Mon Mar 14, 2011 7:51 am

That's probably a good idea except you still get crazy shadowy errors when using characters with transparencies in their hair no?

Yes you do and it's really annoying - I think I found a half strength SSAO which reduced the problem - I recall asking about it a few months back

Hrnchamd gave me this reply

Unfortunately SSAO doesn't work too well with thin transparencies like hair. The best you can do with hair is the left hand image. The problem is there is only one depth value per pixel, here it's either a hair pixel or a background pixel; it can't blend between the hair and the background as there's no information for the background. It may look better if you reduce the SSAO strength in the shader, it seems rather dark as it is.

For the mid and right images, you can see the edges of the hair mesh show instead of the edges of the texture. You need to turn on alpha test for those hair meshes, something like greater equal than 16 (check the hair edges against the background, reduce it to 8 or 4 if the edges aren't smooth enough).