AO “stick” to hidden lines creating unwanted shadows. Huge impact on curved surfaces, see linked screenshot:
I am not quite sure what you are talking about, but yes, shading in SketchUp behaves differently when edges between faces are hidden than when they are smoothed.
I have asked the graphics team to think about this use case.
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The same thing happens on most curved surfaces (I’m on windows)
I don’t think that smoothing/normals are taken into account for the AO.
Make a cylinder and look at the insider of it - ambient occlusion breaks in the same way
likewise a smooth sphere
no edges have been hidden or softened/smooth, the cylinder is a push/pulled circle.
The sphere was imported elsewhere (was doing some other tests), but is the same if you make a sphere using the normal sketchup method.
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The team did have a discussion about this. The problem is that AO works on facets, and how they meet. SketchUp’s ability to make smoothed faces look rounder than the few edges that are actually in there, doesn’t help AO. AO is still looking at the original facets.
It isn’t an easy problem to solve.
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What about an “Angle between normals” slider like Soften has ?
I can ask if that’s something that could be in there. You might think though that you would want AO effect for two facets that are at say 60 degrees to each other, but would not want any AO effect if that was inside a 6 sided circle, that looks entirely smooth.
Giving more segments to the arcs that are supposed to be smooth is one way to solve the problem, though I did find it had to be a lot of segments to completely remove the AO effect.
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Currently this is general effect, correct?
Ie, there is no way (now) to change AO behavior per surface or per entities context.
Not a solution, some people out there are still going for light weight/optimized models.
Perhaps coders could add a rule to sort out all hidden/smoothed lines from the AO pipe?
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Addendum to my first post: unwanted AO artifacts are not exclusive to curves surfaces and Colin is right saying it’s a problem between facets. Below another example happening between two not so angled facets (red arrows in the middle picture). AO is a nice new feature but this kind of rendering artifacts is a no go specially for white model.
(Just a comment here, indeed the edges were not hidden by the user but in such case are by default by the engine.)
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I am on PC and getting artifacts on planes with arc sides, like the face of an archway. I just exported an image but the artifacts don’t show in jpg export, which may be a clue. It looks like an unresolved hidden/soft/smooth edge issue but there is no hidden geometry or planes meeting there. It looks like drapery, perhaps coming from the more attenuated corners, and is just as pronounced as the AO in the desired places. I’m on two computer setups, lenovo desktop and lenovo laptop, both using nvidia (quadro a4000, rtx 3070). Yesterday I updated the nvidia driver on the desktop, didn’t change anything. Trying changing some settings in preferences (aliasing, max texture size, etc) to no avail. I just tried exploding arcs on the arches, it may have minimized it a little, not sure, but it’s still there. I model clean, and have used ThomThom Cleanup to eliminate dupe faces, etc. Even though it seems not to show in exports, I use the live model with clients and it is too unsightly to use. Maybe I can capture the effect in video.
(Just do a screenshot.)
Yep, another example of unwanted AO artifacts and here it’s worst because your wall is (supposed to be) flat. That should definitively not happen… (note some artefacts are also visible on the top/right panel of the window)
The AO code isn’t mature; the dev’s will probably polish it so let’s hope a fix is already in the pipeline! 
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Yes, I was really excited but it’s not usable for me yet. I was noticing the artifacts on actual soft/smooth edges, wishing there was the kind of control you see in Lightroom sharpening, amount, radius and masking. I wish the distance and intensity sliders were graduated, quantifiable and also there was a tolerance slider (masking).
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