Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion

Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion is a ray tracing feature in the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). It is an alternative to HDRP's screen space ambient occlusion, with a more accurate ray-traced solution that can use off-screen data.

Screen space ambient occlusion

Ray-traced ambient occlusion

For information about ray tracing in HDRP, and how to set up your HDRP Project to support ray tracing, see Getting started with ray tracing.

To troubleshoot this effect, HDRP provides an Ambient Occlusion Debug Mode and a Ray Tracing Acceleration Structure Debug Mode in Lighting Full Screen Debug Mode.

Using Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion

Because this feature is an alternative to the Ambient Occlusion Volume Override, the initial setup is very similar. To setup ray traced ambient occlusion, first follow the Enabling Ambient Occlusion and Using Ambient Occlusion steps. After you setup the Ambient Occlusion override, to make it use ray tracing:

1. In the Frame Settings for your Cameras, enable Ray Tracing.
2. Select the Ambient Occlusion override and, in the Inspector, enable Ray Tracing. If you do not see a Ray Tracing option, make sure your HDRP Project supports ray tracing. For information on setting up ray tracing in HDRP, see Getting started with ray tracing.

Properties

HDRP implements ray-traced ambient occlusion on top of the Ambient Occlusion override. For information on the properties that control this effect, see Ray-traced properties.