This is a plugin I wrote for Goldtooth Creative back in the end of 2010. (Thanks to Goldtooth for allowing me to post this). It was used in the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution to render the shadows in all the cut scenes.

The plugin is a modification of the Maya Cgfx plugin, which I enhanced to:

• Scan the Maya scene for all lights
• Build shadow maps for each light that has shadows enabled. (This includes shadow cubes for point lights)
• Render the scene once for each light, accumulating the color in a renderbuffer texture
• Render depth information to a depth texture
• Use depth texture to perform screen-space ambient occlusion
• Composite ambient occlusion with color from all lights

Lights with shadow maps

The plugin allows artists to see shadows in all viewports as they work. Since SSAO requires fremebuffering, it can only be seen in a specially constructed viewport.

Here is a video of a Maya session with shadowed lights in a regular Maya viewport:

Screen space ambient occlusion

This shows two renderings of the same geometry side by side. The first shows the SSAO buffer alone, the second shows it composited into the scene:

Rendering a room in the viewport

Here are some renderings of a room I created. In these, shadows are disabled so that the SSAO is more apparent:

And the same room with shadows and colored lights:

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