Ambient Occlusion is applied to Neon material parts

[Veldaren]

Issue Type: Display
Impact: Moderate
Frequency: Constantly
Date First Experienced: 2021-01-28 20:01:00 (+01:00)
Date Last Experienced: 2021-01-28 20:01:00 (+01:00)

Reproduction Steps:
Place two parts near each other, set their meterial to Neon. Make sure you have Ambient Occlusion enabled by going to File>Studio Settings>Rendering>EditQualityLevel. It should be at Level 21.

System Information:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Six-Core Processor
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER
Memory: 16GB

Expected Behavior:
Since Neon material “gives off its own light”, I’d expect there to be no Ambient Occlusion applied to it.

Actual Behavior:
What actually happens is that AO is applied anyways, which looks weird and unnatural, and also removes the optional property of Neon material looking “flat” (when its color brightness is low enough), with no contours being visible if viewed in front of another Neon part similar to it.

Workaround:
I can lower my EditQualityLevel to 20, or set quality level to 9 when playing games — which disables AO.

[OuterspaceNemo (Nemooo)]

Thanks for the report! We’ve filed a ticket to our internal database and we’ll follow up when we have an update for you.

[xtriel]

apologizes for necroposting, but this still seems to be an issue over a year later and i haven’t seen any update regarding it.

I’ve been helping work on a game that mainly uses neon and ever since the update to the ambient occlusion everything that used the lack of shading on neon to its advantage just looks ugly now

[DuncanDunclub (Duncan Imperium)]

As of today, this issue still persists in any games that doesn’t utilize Future Lighting, which continues to have a major performance hit and isn’t used in the majority of games yet. Most of my projects utilize ShadowMap as it offers the best performance with the best visuals without going overboard, but its heavy use of neon makes Ambient Occlusion an issue.