Having open-sourced its Carbon engine earlier this year, Eve Online creator Fenris Creations is making a sizeable addition to the tech in the form of CORTAO.

This stands for Circular Occluder Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion, a new rendering technique that provides more accurate shading and greater depth, while claiming to keep rendering costs low.

It initially started out as a personal project for Fenris graphics programmer and rendering engineer Daniel Isheden and – like all great innovations – started from a wealth of feeling about a particular problem. The feeling, in this case, was "spite" for the existing state-of-the-art rendering technique. Specifically, Isheden was trying to solve some issues around vegetation, notably something that Eve Online does not have much of.

"The existing state of the art is called Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion (GTAO)," he explains. "I was trying it out and noticing a lot of issues with it. I just realised it didn't actually converge to the ground truth. I started trying to figure out how to actually get something that would converge to the correct thing, given that the information was actually there."

So how does CORTAO work? It's a Screen Space Ambient Occlusion technique (SSAO), which, for the less technically minded, is about calculating how shadows should appear based on environmental lighting.

"These techniques are screen-space limited, so they are only operating on the information that is on the screen," says Isheden. "So it's a very rough approximation in that way. But it doesn't know of anything that is invisible on the screen at the moment.

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