GPU Gems 3 is now available for free online! Please visit our Recent Documents page to see all the latest whitepapers and conference presentations that can help you with your projects. You can also subscribe to our Developer News Feed to get notifications of new material on the site. Jared Hoberock University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Yuntao Jia University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Ambient occlusion is a technique used in production to approximate the effect of environment lighting. Unlike the dull, flat look of local lighting models, ambient occlusion can add realism to a scene by accentuating small surface details and adding soft shadows. Bunnell 2005 demonstrated a novel technique for approximating this effect by integrating occlusion with an adaptive traversal of the hierarchical approximation of a model. While this technique does a good job of appro...