Marty McFly's Ambient Obscurance (MXAO) with IL

Thanks for adding 2 layers option. Now I can finally run only 1 AO solution.
It's a real mystery how none of "big" AO methods have such an option. I guess AO is still considered a something "nice to have" and not "must have".

Do you plan on introducing back luminance consideration for AO intensity or any other way of dynamically controlling intensities, both for AO and IL?
Currently playing around in Witcher 3 and I often find my IL burning up on brighter locations. It would be great if it could auto-adjust itself over a certain luminance threshold or just have the ability to to use a different, less destructive blending formula. I'm not gonna say Screen but will use Unity's terminology - Soft Additive perhaps?

Like with bloom, I had great success using inverse tonemap here. So basically TM(iTM(color) *AOIL).

I'm currently a bit occupied with other projects, hence I haven't uploaded this newest build here on the github repository.

Marty hello , why i cant see any difference in some games , i tried mxao 1.6 , 2.0 etc , game i tested is prince of persia sands of time

Not all games give ReShade correct depth buffer access.

Does anyone actually use the smoothed normals? I'm not satisfied with the feature at all and would like to cut it.It's a resource hog and does more bad than good imo.

btw, I just modified the position reconstruction so it takes Field of View into account. This means more accurate AO placement, especially for wide aspect ratios and/or low FoV values, because MXAO currently assumes 90 degree vertical and horizontal FoV. This works in most cases but it's not ideal. The computation for this shouldn't add any performance overhead.

I'm using it right now, actually. I went back to play Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning recently (I'd never finished it). I have to use Reshade 3.0.4 instead of the latest version, but your MXAO shader looks very nice with it. KOA has a lot of very low poly models, so the AO effect can be a bit abrupt sometimes and smoothed normals seemed to tone that down a bit. The resource hit doesn't hurt any in that particular game, b/c it easily runs at the vsync cap with max settings.

But don't keep it on my account. The FoV accommodation thing sounds like a nice add, as KOA also has a notoriously cramped FoV.

Thanks again, McFly!

I use smoothed normals quite often. It always annoyed me how evidently low in polygons some games could be.

Marty McFly wrote: Does anyone actually use the smoothed normals? I'm not satisfied with the feature at all and would like to cut it.It's a resource hog and does more bad than good imo.

btw, I just modified the position reconstruction so it takes Field of View into account. This means more accurate AO placement, especially for wide aspect ratios and/or low FoV values, because MXAO currently assumes 90 degree vertical and horizontal FoV. This works in most cases but it's not ideal. The computation for this shouldn't add any performance overhead.

I use smooth normals for low polygon games if I have the budget for it. Though it is kinda last on my reshade fps budget list and usually mess about with the blur sharpness instead. Though from another point of view, it's the feature I use the least.

Actually, I was hoping the smoothed normals technique could also be used with the RBM. Geometry normals that are smoothed in-engine, but don't have smoothed normals for the reflection "layer" look bizarre, especially for large environment/landscape geometry.

Please leave it. Some of us who are into screenshots love having high quality / low fps options available. It's not a huge difference but it def helps in giving you that little bit of extra quality.
Also, what VoidsShadow said. Smoothed normals would greatly benefit that shader.
I didn't use it for gameplay as of yet but I like to pop it in some of the setups for ss:


it's really good in faking that pbr look in older games

Marty McFly wrote: Does anyone actually use the smoothed normals? I'm not satisfied with the feature at all and would like to cut it.It's a resource hog and does more bad than good imo.

It seems to do a lot of good for N64 games. Link's model has exaggeratedly obvious polygons when using AO, but the smoothed normals go a long way to making it look round. Performance isn't an issue for me, although it is only a 20fps game.


And thank you for making and continuing to improve this shader. I've been using it with GlideN64 and I think it works really well, but unfortunately the upcoming version of the plugin won't allow depth buffer access (you can get it now by disabling framebuffer emulation). I'm hoping to convince the devs to make the depth buffer available at all times so that this plugin will work, it would be really hard to go back to playing without it.

Hmm I'll try to make it better. It's pretty hard to smooth the surfaces without artifacts, I'd have to detect somehow where an edge is and how far a flat area extends. Then it needs a falloff so it doesn't smooth 90 degree angles and so on.

Marty McFly wrote: Hmm I'll try to make it better. It's pretty hard to smooth the surfaces without artifacts, I'd have to detect somehow where an edge is and how far a flat area extends. Then it needs a falloff so it doesn't smooth 90 degree angles and so on.

Will keeping it affect performance? Could always have two shaders, MXAO and MXAO + Smooth Normals.

No have new update for this effect ??

Keeping it won't affect performance. I'm just really unsatisfied with it, it's a real ugly hack.

So, I worked a bit on this smoothed normals thing and I think I've come up with a better solution than before. Tried some 3D catmull-rom but that didn't work out. My current solution basically scans in multiple directions to find the neighbouring faces and interpolates the current normal based on how far those neighborus are away. A bit choppier than the old solution but the differences are gone in the blur pass anyways and it's much faster and doesn't erode small details as much.

Looks good. I love try it out in the future. It seems handle the car's corners well. Also looks good on the humans. Though A/B comparison would be easier to see what changed.

i happy waiting for new update for this mod

How to fix this?

Huh, that looks as if the depth buffer is stretched somehow. This means all depth related effects have placement issues. One could fix that by reverting that stretch but from your screenshot I'm not certain if it's a zoom in, or shift of whatever. Can you provide me with 2 screenshots with the exactly the same position, where AO is off and on with debug mode?