Comment by potatolicious

SSAO is IMO the wrong tool for a cool effect. If you 3D printed your shield and put it in real lighting conditions you would not see shadows that look anything like what you have in your SSAO pass.

Like the other poster said, what you've simulated instead is the accumulation of dirt. It looks better not because it's more realistically lit, but because it's more realistically dirty.

If you want to achieve dirt accumulation, there have always been many tools that were able to generate "dirt" textures by analyzing geometry, they achieve very much the same results, without the runtime performance hit - and without the negative scenario where the SSAO is "dirtying" up literally every edge and crevice being rendered.

I think SSAO is largely a fad, and not a particularly great one at that, but it's less visually offensive than the current trend of injecting a massive amount of chromatic aberration into every game, like you're playing the game through the bottom of a Coke bottle.