I wonder how that compares to bent normals in practice, the look seems very similar. https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/bent-normal-maps-in-unreal-engine/
Generally, the approach with AO will depend on how good the lighting systems are in your engine or target renderer. * AO should be typically applied with a secondary texture and not baked into albedo (or other maps). This allows the engine to multiply the AO on ambient or indirect lighting pass only. AO should not multiply…
"Re-reading thread, so we may no longer need Ao in the future with the new lighting system becoming "main" course for lighting?" That's not quite how the renderering pipelines of game engine evolve or get used. It doesn't matter *one bit* if this or that feature gets added (for instance, a renderer having some way to…
Here's a set of examples * (upper left) basic raster (game engine-like) lighting with an ambient sky and some direct lights, no AO effect. The reflections are clearly incorrect here which prevents the surface from reading as metal * (upper right) AO multiplied on the specular reflections - this is equivalent to multiplying…