your “Bad TV” shader looks also very cool – great work.

glad you like the shader and find it useful.

And you are right – as ambient occlusion is an approximation of global illumination, the object should be shadowed equally with no recognizable light direction (dome-/skylight).

However I integrated an X/Y offset to tweak the direction as I found it useful to have some small “relighting” feature.

Even while unrealistically in terms of AO, it helps to bring out certain features of a scene or object and as AO is an approximation and 2D SSAO even more so…

I took a look at your visualization module.
Nice work with the client and rendering.

If you would load an additional Z-depth map for every image, you could indeed use the shader to dynamically shadow the object.

But I think this would only make sense if the user was given some kind of real-time control over the effect (like a dragable lightsource for example).
Otherwise it would be better to render a real AO pass directly into the image-sequence.

But if you are looking for a way to relight/reshadow the scene in real-time – this would work while I have to point out that there is a simpler and better approach to pure relighting using normalmaps.

However the actual kernel uses two methods the flashplayer doesn´t support: a function call and a loop.
But with some unlovely hardcoding you can get rid of both.

If you need any help or suggestions on the implementation or relighting in general please feel free to contact me.

Cheers!

- Jan