SpaghetMeNot

geoNodesAO for Blender [FREE]

Added 2024-01-23 15:54:23 +0000 UTC

Ray-traced Ambient Occlusion Directly on Geometry

Fully procedural, no need to bake textures
Creates an attribute you can use in shaders or geometry nodes e.g. scatter on occluded areas
Specify another object and/or collection to contribute to occlusion calculation

Requires Blender 4.0+

What's Included?

One .blend file contains:

Ambient Occlusion node asset - simply include blender file in your asset library to use anywhere
AO examples. A couple of meshes with the most basic shader set up to preview AO result
Fibonacci sphere & hemisphere distribution node groups. Used for ray distribution in the Ambient Occlusion node
Fibonacci distribution examples. Examples of distributing points using the Fibonacci distribution nodes

Thanks for your support!

Download .blend:

geoNodesAO.blend

geoNodesAO_v1_0_0.zip

Thank you for your download/purchase :)

I greatly appreciate your interest, especially as a new seller! If you like the asset and find it helpful, please consider leaving a review or checking out my other products: https://spaghetmenot.gumroad.com/

Any questions, feedback or problems don't hesitate to reach out:

Email: spaghetmenot@gmail.co m

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Mastodon: mastodon.social/@SpaghetMeNot

Twitter: twitter.com/SpaghetMeN0t

How to Install:

[REQUIRES BLENDER 4.0+]

Simply download and open the .blend file to play around. Install the asset library from the .zip to add the node as a modifier available in all scenes.

Install Asset Library

For more info on asset libraries: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/files/asset_libraries/introduction.html#introduction

Download .zip file
Unzip/extract folder to your desired location
Open Blender and go to Edit/Preferences/File Paths/Asset Libraries
Click + Add Asset Library
Navigate to the unzipped folder and press Add Asset Library. (Make sure you are in the geoNodesAO Folder and not the Grouped SpaghetMeNot Catalog)

Restart Blender in order for the modifier to appear in the "Add Modifier" menu

Alternate Catalog

By default, the assets are organized into generic categories to make using them feel more native within Blender.

I've included an alternate catalog that groups everything under a "SpaghetMeNot" catalog to keep all my nodes across products together. This may be preferable if you have lots of node asset libraries.

To use this simply replace blender_assets.cats.txt with the version found inside the Grouped SpaghetMeNot Catalog Folder

Settings/Notes

Ambient Occlusion is point based — it works best when there is enough geometry to support it
Increasing the "Ray Count" can slow down the calculation significantly - be careful! Consider using the blur to counter noise instead of ray count
"Strength" adjusts the darkness of calculated AO
The demo scene is visualizing the Color Attribute "Color". New objects in this scene will need this adding under Object Data Properties or they will appear black.