threejs-screen-space-ambient-occlusion

name	threejs-screen-space-ambient-occlusion
description	Implement a production GTAO path in Three.js. Use for half-resolution horizon sampling, reversed-depth reconstruction, bent-normal encoding, full-resolution bilateral reconstruction, environment-light application, contact grounding, and halo diagnosis.

Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion

AO estimates missing ambient visibility. It must modulate indirect lighting, not repaint all scene color with a dark multiply.

Workflow

1. Verify linear depth and view-space normals.
2. Reconstruct view position consistently.
3. Sample horizon visibility in a controlled radius.
4. Estimate AO and optional bent normal.
5. Denoise with depth/normal-aware filters.
6. Apply to indirect diffuse and environment response.

Read references/gtao-bent-normal-pipeline.md.

Failure conditions

• direct light and emission are darkened;
• radius is specified only in pixels;
• foreground silhouettes cast thick screen-space halos;
• depth discontinuities are blurred together;
• AO remains strong at distances where its world radius is subpixel;
• bent normals are treated as ordinary geometric normals;
• the implementation claims temporal accumulation even though this path has none.

Routing boundary

This skill owns GTAO gathering, bent normals, denoising, and AO application. Use $threejs-image-pipeline only when its depth/normal buffers or pass order must be coordinated with other image-space systems.