[Designer] HBAO filter doesn't tile?

LTS3D

I have a couple tiles of height maps that I'm going to use for terrain and am stitching them together, but the HBAO filter doesn't seem to tile correctly. I get this weird black shadow on most of the edges of my height maps converted to AO. Anyone had this problem before? Or worked around it?

Jerc

Make sure your nodes have their tiling set correctly. If you imported images, it's likely that their tiling mode is set to No Tiling by default.

LTS3D

All nodes have Tiling Mode set to "H and V Tiling"

So essentially, we have 4 tiles exported from world machine, and I'm trying to make AO's and Normals based on the exported height maps. But we get these black seams inbetween each height map. The height maps themselves do not tile, but they certainly don't have these giant black shadows on them along the edges. Additionally, when I use the normal map node, those tile fine between each other when applied to our 4 patches.

Jerc

Ha if the height doesn't tile, then you can't have an AO that tiles. The AO algorithm samples the height far around each pixel to determine the amount of light reaching that pixel, if there is nothing to sample or if your map doesn't tile, it will sample the wrong information and you will end up with a seam. You would have seams too (although probably less visible) if you tried to bake a raytraced AO from non-seamless tiles one by one.

LTS3D

Thank you for the input! Made a similar discovery. I was able to get around it by forcing No Tiling on the AO node itself, and turning GPU optimization off, that got me a comparable AO that connects to the other tiles rather seamlessly.