Enable ambient occlusion in your project

To enable ambient occlusionA method to approximate how much ambient light (light not coming from a specific direction) can hit a point on a surface.
See in Glossary in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), you must use:

• The Screen Space Ambient Occlusion Renderer Feature, to enable the effect on a Universal Renderer.
• The Screen Space Ambient Occlusion Volume Override, to configure how the effect looks.

Note: You need both the Renderer Feature and the Volume Override for ambient occlusion to work.

The Renderer Feature has no properties of its own. URP controls ambient occlusion entirely through the Volume Override. The Renderer Feature displays the settings from earlier URP versions as read-only values, under Settings (Reference Only), so that you can copy them into a Volume Override.

When you upgrade a project, URP copies those settings into the Default Volume Profile. It sets Mode to SSAO and Quality to Custom, so that your project keeps the look it had before you upgraded.

Enable ambient occlusion

To enable ambient occlusion on a Universal Renderer, follow the steps in Add a Renderer Feature to a URP Renderer. In step 2, select Screen Space Ambient Occlusion.

Cameras that use this renderer can now render ambient occlusion.

Configure ambient occlusion

To control how ambient occlusion looks in your scene:

1. Create or select a volume in your scene. For more information, refer to Set up a volume in URP.
2. In the Inspector, select Add Override > Lighting > Screen Space Ambient Occlusion.
3. Enable each property you want to change. URP ignores a property until you enable it. To enable every property at once, select All.
4. Set Intensity to a value above 0. The effect doesn’t render if Intensity, Radius, or Falloff Distance is 0.

Any camera that uses the renderer, and that the volume affects, now renders ambient occlusion.

To choose between the two ambient occlusion algorithms, refer to Ambient occlusion modes in URP. For a description of each property, refer to the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion Volume Override reference for URP.

Additional resources

• Adding pre-built effects via Renderer Features in URP
• Introduction to screen space ambient occlusion in URP
• Set up a volume in URP