I read in a post where one had issues that the antialiasing wasn’t working, he was told that he had to restart Unity for ti to work.
I have my antialiasing settings a 16x and it isn’t working (on soft shadows) though I’ve closed and started Unity many times over the past three days and still no change.
Any ideas?
Hi Don,
Are you using any full screen effects such as Glow, Blur or do you have any refractive shaders in your project? If so, anti-aliasing doesn’t work with those yet and will be disabled. The UT guys have stated in their roadmap that this problem will be fixed with a free upgrade in the 2.x cycle 
Hope this helps,
Nathan
Hi Nathan,
No, not using any of these screen effects, but will have to check on the refractive shader.
That may be it, thanks!
Guess not, I had previously used a refractive shader but removed it a long time ago.
I think it’ll cause AA to be turned off if you even have a material in the project with a refractive shader… even if it’s not in any scene. You may want to check that.
Dunno, Nathan, seems I’ve changed the only material in the project to diffuse and still no change.
I had this problem with a scene, and had to actually delete the refractive shader and it’s dependencies from the project, not just from the scene (I had imported the water shaders from the Sewer example project). If you can’t find the offending asset, you might try exporting your base assets as a package and reimporting into a clean project.
Does this (exporting your base assets as a package and importing into a clean project) mean you have to reapply textures to everything?
No, just select your scene in Project view, choose Select Dependencies, then Export Package. Import that back into a clean project, should work fine.
Well, I wrote down all the coordinates of the object that previously had the refractive material on it and created another, moved all the children to the new object and deleted the first.
It seems to be much better now.
My card (GeForce 8800 Ultra) must not support 16x antialiasing since Unity shows it is only using 8x.
Adjusting the Shadow distance has helped quite a bit.
It seems like there are two different things being discussed here – shadow quality and antialiasing. It is late and maybe I misread, but…
In the Quality Settings, “Anti Aliasing” determines how smooth polygon edges are (and how much video memory it consumes). This doesn’t currently work when you have some render texture stuff going on (full-screen effects), etc. and changes to it don’t just automatically happen (I think that is where the initial restart suggestion came from).
Then there is the shadow stuff. Nothing about render effects prevents you from having high-quality smooth shadows. Unity uses shadow maps to display shadows. For directional lights, “Shadow Distance” (how far from the camera the shadow is shown in game units) and “Shadow Cascades” (this is for parallel split shadow maps and bigger is higher quality) in “Quality Settings” are the two critical quality-related settings. For spot and point lights, the shadow map size is what you need to change for quality. This is done with “Shadow Resolution”.
Another thing to remember – just because it seems to come up often – is that point lights can only have hard shadows.
I was seeing the jaggedness on the shadow edges and thinking it was aliasing. Had the cascades as high as it would go but doing some adjusting of the Shadow Distance seems to have helped.
Glad to hear it is working for you.
For future reference if people come across this thread and wonder why changing Shadow Distance helped, take a look at this link and scroll down to the heading “Shadow Distance is Important!”
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/DirectionalShadowDetails.html