obscurance fields

[Davros]

Sniper Elite 3 has this option, does anyone know what it does? It doesnt seem to make any difference when enabled/disabled
Google comes up with a lot of entries for Screen-space far-field ambient obscurance I dont know if that is the same thing plus the descriptions are all in tech speak.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Probably is related to doing "blobby"-type occlusion type things like your googling implies.

 

[deckard]

It is to do with occluded indirect light/shadows, like an advanced SSAO it works out the distance between objects and then affects the shadow depth accordingly.

 

[MJP]

This interview talks about it: http://www.dsogaming.com/interviews/rebellion-talks-sniper-elite-3-tech-tessellation-mantle-dx12-multicore-cpus-obscurance-fields-shader/

The basic gist is that they're computing occlusion from a set of primitive shapes (spheres and ellipsoids in their case) for every pixel, which you can do analytically since it's a known shape. So if you imagine you took a character and you tried to build a similar shape out of spheres and capsules, and then at runtime you skinned those capsules to the same joints that the mesh uses so that the capsules follow the same movements that you see on screen. Then each one of those capsules casts a very soft shadow on nearby geometry.

Splinter Cell Conviction did something like this many years ago, and more recently The Last Of Us and Remember Me featured occlusion systems based on primitives. We also do something very similar in The Order for our characters. You should check out the presentations for those games if you're interested in more info, or looking for some more screenshots and illustrations.