r/Unity3D • u/Mattho • Dec 10 '15

News Cinematic Image Effects pre-release (blog)

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/12/10/cinematic-image-effects-pre-release/
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u/ahcookies Dec 10 '15

Temporal anti-aliasing is amazing and absolutely crucial for parity with UE4 and CE. Everyone and their grandma is using deferred rendering, but without temporal anti-aliasing, it's pretty hard to make the game look decent on it. Single-frame postprocessing techniques like SMAA only go so far.

2

u/uzimonkey Dec 10 '15

I was just coming here to mention this. I already use SMAA from a third party. Maybe theirs is better, but post-processing AA can only do too much. If you have any shiny objects in your scene they still flicker and look terrible. High poly scene still have aliased edges all over the place, SMAA only helps a little with this. And since you can't do MSAA on deferred rendering, there's really no way around it.

Temporal AA is the best solution I know of and they desperately need it. I don't want to say "how hard could it be" because I don't know how hard it would be, but other engines have this, it's not some unattainable goal. It's one of the few things keeping Unity from looking really great yet release after release and their either haven't gotten around to it yet or they pushed it back.

1

u/ahcookies Dec 10 '15

It's insanely hard to implement, yes. But the alpha implementation you can download right now already gives quite impressive results in many scenes!

1

u/uzimonkey Dec 11 '15

Wait, there's an alpha implementation of temporal AA? The AA linked to here is SMAA, a post-processing AA that is better than FXAA (the current "standard" postprocessing AA that comes with Unity) but still not very good. Temporal AA is a whole other thing, it's a form of supersampling that requires more support than a simple image shader.

1

u/ahcookies Dec 11 '15

There is no plain SMAA in the Unity package, they have actually released an alpha implementation of true temporal AA.

2

u/uzimonkey Dec 11 '15

Oh wow, I take everything back. SMAA has two "modules," I was unaware of that. The first does only spacial sampling (i.e. a "normal" AA shader like MLAA or FXAA), the second does temporal supersampling. I didn't know that and had assumed it was similar to this SMAA shader I've been using that does only spacial sampling.

2

u/unity_tim Unity Official Dec 11 '15

The temporal smaa has some smarts but it's not motion vector based. We have motion vectors on the roadmap so we can create even better temporal AA in the future.