How to Enable Ambient Occlusion in Blender Eevee

Ambient Occlusion (AO) is a rendering technique that calculates how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting, adding realistic contact shadows where surfaces meet. This guide explains how to enable and fine-tune Ambient Occlusion in Blender's Eevee render engine to add depth and realism to your 3D renders quickly.

Step 1: Set the Render Engine to EEVEE

  1. Open your Blender project.
  2. In the Properties panel on the right side, click on the Render Properties tab (represented by a camera icon).
  3. At the top of the panel, locate the Render Engine dropdown menu and select EEVEE.

Step 2: Enable the Ambient Occlusion Setting

  • In Blender 4.1 and older: In the Render Properties tab, locate the Ambient Occlusion section and check the box next to it to activate the effect.
  • In Blender 4.2 and newer (EEVEE Next): Ambient Occlusion is integrated into the raytracing pipeline. In the Render Properties tab, expand the Raytracing panel, enable it, and configure the Fast GI Approximation settings to achieve classic AO effects.

Step 3: Adjust Ambient Occlusion Parameters

Expand the Ambient Occlusion section to adjust the settings according to your scene scale:

  • Distance: Controls how far shadows spread from contact edges. Lower values create tight, subtle contact shadows, while higher values create broader, softer shadows.
  • Factor: Controls the strength and darkness of the occlusion effect.
  • Trace Precision: Increases the accuracy of the shadow calculations at the cost of slight performance overhead.
  • Bounces (if available): Allows ambient occlusion to take indirect light bounces into account, making scenes look brighter and more natural.

Step 4: Using the Ambient Occlusion Shader Node (Optional)

If you need per-material control over Ambient Occlusion instead of a global effect:

  1. Open the Shader Editor.
  2. Press Shift + A and search for the Ambient Occlusion node.
  3. Connect the Color or AO output of the node to the Base Color or mix it with your texture setup using a Color Mix node. This allows you to tint or isolate the AO effect on specific objects.