AO and foliage

Probably a stupid question, but we turned on ambient occlusion in our post-process settings, and it’s affecting our foliage more than we’d like. We need it to be pretty strong for most other aspects of our game to look right, but it makes super strong occlusion on the foliage.

58154-foliage_ao.jpg

How to turn this down …?

Hey Mothership.Entertainment,

If you would like to brighten the AO of your foliage, you can add a VertexNormal node in your material graph and plug this into A input of a multiply using the red channel. Then create a constant vector and plug this into the B input of your multiply node. This value will increase or decrease the Ambient Occlusion brightness.

Or if you have an Ambient Occlusion texture sample for your foliage, you can simply create a multiply node and plug the texture sample into the A of the multiply, and a constant vector into the B. Take the output of your multiply and plug this into the Ambient Occlusion input.

Ambient Occlusion Brightness

Hopefully these work for you, and you might need to edit the Ambient Occlusion of your project a little to match the AO term from your foliage. I generally tend to create a Material Instance Constant so I can rapidly edit my scene until I find the right settings and values needed.

Let me know if you have further questions or need additional assistance.

Thank you,