AO Roadmap

[likangning93]

• Experiment to determine well-balanced settings for baking building AO
• For baking to vertices: assess advanced baking approximations like least squares baking
• Add an option to decouple the uniform grid cell size from maximum ray distance
• treat the grid as a sparse voxel structure, voxelize rays and check for intersections along the line of voxels? Dispense with rays altogether? This starts to resemble voxel cone tracing
• use a different datastructure, like an oct tree?
• Apply some kind of inside-outside algorithm to correct model normals? (possibly not in this stage)
• For baking to vertices: assess and document payload improvements of quantization
• For baking to vertices: assess ways to reduce the number of attributes and varyings that need to be added to shaders
• for AO on a diffuse texture, detect and use any existing TEX_COORD instead of a new varying
• detect places AO can be packed in other attributes (VEC4 positions, VEC3/VEC4 normals)
• For uniform grids, voxels, or octrees: experiment with space filling curves for improved triangle access.
• For baking to textures: use conservative rasterization when sampling over triangles
• Replace the current random ray generator (dependent on Javascript's random number generator) with something like a sobol sequence
• For baking to textures: Add a stage to generate texture coordinates
• possibly, unique AO texture coordinates with separate AO textures
• also requires shader modification for texture baking
• There's lots of opportunities for obvious parallelism, including GPU parallelism, is it worth it to improve the latency of baking one model?