RELEASED FLOWFIRE Super Sampling SSAA - Visually best Anti Aliasing!

[imtrobin]

demo?

[Flow-Fire-Games]

We will add a web demo in the upcoming update among some other features and fixes.

[punk1]

@Flow Fire Games

Since we don’t own an Oculus with Head Tracking I’m not too familiar with its Unity integration. SSAA basically downsamples a high resolution frame of your scene which is in no way related to movement controls and should not affect those in any way. The Camera Pipeline is given by Unity and we do not alter position or anything of sorts. Are you 100% certain that it is related to turning SSAA on ? Is the camera potentially locked per accident (or maybe even a different one) ? Is the problem still apparent after a Unity restart ? If you can send us more details to flowfire@inbox.com, we will look into it asap.

I had a little more time to debug this, if you open unity 5.1+ new blank scene, turn on native VR support, run blank scene, turn on SSAA, head look stops working, turn off SSAA head look starts working again, so it currently doesn’t work with VR unfortunately, well it dont appear to anyway

[Stormbreaker]

Just bought the asset, it looks great Unfortunately it doesn’t play nice with uRecord resulting in a pixelated output (this is recording with the Player at 960x540 using 2x upscale to produce a 1080p video). Do you have any ideas on how to fix this? Ideally uRecord will be rendering the game at 1080p with the SSAA rendering at 4k then downsampling.

Thanks for your help.

EDIT: Also, what does Use Custom Depth do?
EDIT x2: Just done a couple of tests. It seems like the SSAA shader works by reading the current resolution and basing its calculations on that. uRecord doesn’t use the display resolutions, it uses some trickery to render the game at a higher resolution. I think if there were a way to set the input resolution in the SSAA shader rather using the actual resolution it would be compatible and work with no issues.

[Flow-Fire-Games]

We will look into the headtracking issue. It sounds very abstrusive but we want this to work out. Thanks for your input.

@Stormbreaker
Could you send us a screenshot at flowfire@inbox.com ? We have an idea what is causing this, and should be already fixed on our version and is coming with the feature update next week, which also obsoletes custom depth (used for multi camera setups) by replacing it with a automatic solution.
(On another note, did you maybe turn SSAA below “1” ? That would also result in a pixelated look as it reduces resolution)

[Stormbreaker]

@Flow Fire Games

We will look into the headtracking issue. It sounds very abstrusive but we want this to work out. Thanks for your input.

@Stormbreaker
Could you send us a screenshot at flowfire@inbox.com ? We have an idea what is causing this, and should be already fixed on our version and is coming with the feature update next week, which also obsoletes custom depth (used for multi camera setups) by replacing it with a automatic solution.
(On another note, did you maybe turn SSAA below “1” ? That would also result in a pixelated look as it reduces resolution)

Hey,

I have the SSAA effect set to 2x upscale. uRecord operates within the Unity player in the editor. My editor resolution is 960540 and I have the uRecord scale factor set to two to give a 19201080p recording resolution. It seems like the SSAA takes the 960540 resolution as opposed to the uRecord 19201080p resolution, and the SSAA produces an output image of resolution 960540 which uRecord then upscales to 19201080p resulting in an ugly, low resolution look.

I’ll send a picture when I get back on my laptop tomorrow, but it won’t show much (just an upscaled looking screenshot). If you need me to test any updates my email is marcsteene@yahoo.co.uk.

[overthere]

@Stormbreaker Can I ask why you aren’t just running uRecord at the resolution you want? Isn’t that the point of the asset, that you can run at ultra resolutions, render not in real time, and get a smooth video at the end?

[Stormbreaker]

@overthere

@Stormbreaker Can I ask why you aren’t just running uRecord at the resolution you want? Isn’t that the point of the asset, that you can run at ultra resolutions, render not in real time, and get a smooth video at the end?

uRecord is designed to be run in the editor and not in the built game. Thus, the resolution of player is restricted to the size available to it when things like the hierarchy are taken into account (my laptop screen is 1920*1080 and it’s not possible to run the game at that resolution in the editor) hence uRecord has the upscale option to account for this.

[mustardseed]

I’m running into the same issue that @Stormbreaker is. I’m trying to use SSAA with uRecord, but I have to keep uRecord’s upscale set at 1 or I get a pixelated image.

[Stormbreaker]

And if anyone is wondering, “Well, why not just render the game at 4k using uRecord and downsample the video to 1080p”, this is because rendering at 4k with uRecord takes 4 times longer than rendering at 1080p with x2 SSAA. It also means a quarter of the storage space is used, each 4k PNG frame is 12mb meaning a second of footage at 60fps is almost 1GB in size. As I need to record around 2 minutes of footage it’s not feasible to record at 4k.

[Flow-Fire-Games]

Does uRecord not offer any automatic compression that bypasses the huge file sizes ?

You could also record at 1080p with 2x SSAA with any of the usual external recording tools such
as Fraps. uRecord seems to simply use the Unity built-in screenshot functionality and put the pictures together but we will have a look at it and maybe there is a way to change the order of doing things, but likely this has to be done on uRecords end, if so, then we will contact them.

[mustardseed]

The main reason to not use Fraps, is for performance. If I have a scene that is too complex to render in real-time at 60fps, uRecord can still capture it at 60fps, just not in real time. Even a low-end laptop could render a 4K video at 60fps.

My solution for now is to use capture in uRecord without any upscale at 1080p with 2xSSAA, but I’m lucky enough to have a big enough monitor at work that I can do that. At home, I don’t have this luxury.

I’m using this setup to render videos and animations for non-gaming applications. And your SSAA has been an amazing asset. I was about ready to give up on trying to use Unity for great looking renders. So thanks again for the great asset!

[Stormbreaker]

I have the same reasons as mustardseed. Please update the SSAA to be compatible! It makes such a huge difference to the look of the scene. And as uRecord is currently free with Level 11, there are going to be a lot more users of it very shortly so compatibility with the asset would be great. I don’t think it’d be a difficult modification, it’s a shame that the source code isn’t available as I’d probably be able to do it myself.

[mustardseed]

Here’s my result capturing some scenes with uRecord and 2x SSAA at 1080p. Every other AA solution pales compared to what FlowFire has built!

Now just imagine this in 4K or even rendered as a 3D 360 VR video. Hopefully we can get it working with uRecord’s upscale.

Be sure to watch this at 1080p60

- YouTube

[Flow-Fire-Games]

Very glad you enjoy our Super Sampling. If you want to support and allow us to spend more time adding features and polish, a store rating, review or tweet would go a long way : )

The next update with different sampling algorithms, will look even better and you will be able to choose which one you like best. (among a bunch of other things)
We try to get as many fixes we can until the submitting of the update planned for monday.

[Stormbreaker]

The update sounds great. If you make the product compatible with uRecord I’ll put up a comprehensive 5 star review about the product.

[Stormbreaker]

By the way mustard, what resolution are your work monitors running at that allows you to record at 1080p in the player?

[mustardseed]

It’s a 4K monitor. I pull the editor “Game” viewer out of the editor and scale it up alone. I can get around 2880x1620 pretty safely.

[Stormbreaker]

Flowfire, does it make any difference if our post effects are before or after the SSAA component?

[Flow-Fire-Games]

No it doesn’t matter, any post effect will use the high resolution image.
The SSAA component you add to your camera is basically just a hook.

The downsampling occurs in another camera with a slightly higher depth value.
If you really want to use the downsampled image you could add another camera with a high depth value, Culling Mask: Nothing, Clear Flags: Don’t Clear and add your post effect there.
However, keep in mind that any depth buffer content gets lost during downsampling.