Blender game engine ambient light

I want to uniformly lighten shadows a little so shadowed details can still be made out for a toonish render. The world buttons ambient settings I would have expected to be the solution have the result of uniformly adding colour to the scene rather than light. I know I could use hemis to fill the shadows but that is still directional and so nonuniform.

I know I could add some emit to the materials and tweak the material and lamp colours to fit with an ambient light colour but that is labourious and awkward. I also want something like this, I need uniform light all over, like a regular lamp, and using multiple lamps is a last resort. If you read the opening post you would see this has already been considered. A blue cube in green ambient light will render cyan. The Ambient Light color kinda drives the whole process, in my mind. If you jump ahead and try to Occlude with black when it is supposed to be daylight, you will get like an opposite effect than what you are looking for.

The amount of ambient light that each object is affected by is set using the Ambient slider in the materials. This is also the setting that is used in the Ambient Occlusion pass, which bookeater correctly found to affect the shadows that you wanted to affect.

Then the AO pass will add the color of the ambient light according to the intensity of the Ambient material slider. Correct, AO is not required for simple ambient light. Light is calculated with a ray-traced method which is the same as that used by Ambient Occlusion.

Also, you can choose the environment color source white, sky color, sky texture and the light energy. It is good for mimicking the sky in outdoor lighting. Environment lighting can be fairly noisy at times. Mist can greatly enhance the illusion of depth in your rendering. To create mist, Blender makes objects farther away more transparent decreasing their Alpha value so that they mix more of the background color with the object color. With Mist enabled, the further the object is away from the camera the less its alpha value will be.

For full details, see Mist. Blender 2. If we expand the viewport and render subsections, we find AO bounces. If this isn't set to zero, ambient occlusion will take over after the specified number of bounces. For instance, if we set this to two, we will let global illumination do two bounces in the scene before AO takes over. Even if this ambient occlusion fakes light and breaks the physical accuracy, a benefit is that it is performance friendly and can help reduce fireflies in interior renders.

In Eevee, ambient occlusion is a post-processing effect. We find it in the properties panel among the render settings. Open the Ambient Occlusion section to reveal the properties. To enable it, press the checkbox on the section headline. In Eevee, ambient occlusion makes much more sense. We rely mostly on information gathered from different views.

For instance, the screen space, maybe a reflection plane , which is just another view to add information to the scene or an irradiance volume that samples light so that we can emit bounce light according to that sample location.

Overall, we are just gathering information from different perspectives of the scene to make it complete. It only makes sense to add ambient occlusion into the mix so that we can utilize all the available information to create the render we want. Related content: A guide to Blender Eevee render settings. For completions sake, we will cover ambient occlusion in Eevee here as well. But for an alternative view and more in depth, check out the article above. The distance parameter adjust how far away surrounding objects can be to still contribute to the AO.

A higher number will result in more and darker shadow. The factor blends AO on top of the original image. Note though that the slider goes from 0 to 1 but we can type a higher number into the field.

We can, for instance, have a factor of five hundred if we felt that it was a fair value. The trace precision is a bit tricky, it short, don't touch it. But if you have artefacts you can adjust this to see if it solves the problem. It will give you a performance hit in complex scenes but may sometimes solve those problems. The bent normal refers to the angle most light hits the surface as opposed to the tangent normal witch is the direction the face is pointing. It is supposed to give slightly more accurate ambient occlusion.

The last setting, bounce approximation takes the light hitting an object into account. An object with more light gets less occlusion. This is a good setting to leave on as it increases realism. In Eevee ambient occlusion is a much more essential tool than in Cycles. It gives us more control over our scenes. For instance, we may have irradiance volumes that give excessive light in some areas while providing good indirect lighting in other areas.

In those cases, we can use ambient occlusion to dial back the indirect light where it is less desired. Many different techniques play together to get a nice final render in Eevee, and ambient occlusion is one of those tools.

The AO shader has limitations in both Cycles and Eevee right now. Some of the settings in the node only works in Cycles while Eevee depend on the global settings for this shader.

We must fall back on Cuda for Nvidia graphics cards. The AO node is also relatively expensive in terms of performance in Cycles. If we need maximum performance, we may benefit form baking ambient occlusion instead. We will touch on that further below. Let's start in Eevee. We can use the color and normal inputs.

The distance is Cycles only and instead; we use the global post-processing settings in the render tab. This means that we can't have different distances for different shaders.

But we can still work around that by adding a color ramp node after the ambient occlusion node. All properties without an input or output node are also cycles only. This leaves us with the Color and AO outputs for now. If we turn off global ambient occlusion the AO output will stop working. But the color output will work either way. We are using Eevee and ambient occlusion is turned on. We can put a color or use a texture as input in the ambient occlusion shader that we pass to the mixRBG node.

The AO output is piped to a colorramp so that we can adjust the AO effect. In this case I turned up the black a lot to make it very prominent in the occluded areas.

Then I added a green tint before the ambient occlusion shadow fades away. We mix this back with the color in the mixRGB node set to multiply with the factor slider set to 1. We can lower this value to fade away the ambient occlusion effect. Thanks to the compatibility between Eevee and Cycles we can use the same node setup, but in Cycles the other settings are used as well. You can see that there is some difference in color, we can probably tweak the scene to make them more similar.

But that is not why we are here. The overall effect is the same.