This article was updated. Jump to Update 1. Update 2.
Occlusion: Too much, yes! But more important, they thought about how light works. More or less. And even if the effect is a bit too strong, I really like that the corners of the walls are darkened. I’m not sure how they did this, because the occlusion shadow looks very straight. Maybe a light map? But maybe they used vertex color? I have no idea.
Because of Deus Ex impressed me a lot with this occlusion stuff (besides of the great gameplay & story), I forgive the new “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” that they overuse the occlusion again. I see it as their style:
Update 1This in-depth article about occlusion was posted in the comment section, and I think it deserves to be mentioned as a new update.
Update 2I just realized that Sims 4 uses a mixture of the usual SSAO and also another layer of Ambient Occlusion by placing custom meshes:
Here the same but as closer view:
There is something unclear to me, though. The game renders the whole scene into a depth buffer first and then generates an SSAO buffer from that data (see below). When the wall is rendered, we do actual see some of that AO being applied (green boxes) but we also see areas where the AO is not applied (red boxes). I don’t know why that is:
By the way: This is the AO texture for the manual setup. I did not put the red font in there. It’s like this in the original texture! :)
