MSAA / HDR / forward rendering

Why exactly does Unity disable MSAA for forward rendering and HDR?
This seems entirely backwards, given that MSAA is normally a problem for deferred rendering because the antialiased edges cause normals to blend and give incorrect results for lighting.

Technically there's no reason MSAA can't be used for a floating point target, and Unity is the only case I've seen of disallowing MSAA for a floating point target.

komatii

 

Bump since after all this time it's still not available. If it's a cross platform problem, at least enable it for DX11 only or something.

 

From http://aras-p.info/projHDR.html

 

Indeed. I've had to avoid HDR in my project, since post processed anti-aliasing causes too many issues for me.

I have two issues with post AA that don't occur with MSAA. The first is blurring of my detailed skyboxes. The second is that I have a 3D world -> transparent overlays -> 3d world -> transparent overlays setup, so it's basically impossible not to have the UI overlays that are in between 3D cameras not get terribly blurred. Looks terrible.

The thing is, I could really benefit from HDR.

 

Everyone benefits from HDR. The solution for me is merely to wait until Unity comes up with a great post fx AA.

 

Wait, has this been addressed in Unity 5 already? My current project is in 4.6 (planning on waiting for a 5.1 version before converting).

I pulled up a test project in Unity 5.0.1f1 that uses an HDR camera (DX11, deferred, linear), and it DID let me select 4x Multi Sampling in the Edit -> Project Settings -> Quality inspector and anti-aliasing is being applied. Am I dreaming or was that feature quietly added recently?

 

Yeah unity's making new awesomesauce AA. As for AA in deferred, that quality setting probably doesn't work (I wouldn't expect it to).

 

You're right. I was dreaming. Even selecting 8x in deferred has no effect. Turned out the test scene just didn't look that bad with zero AA.

I guess I'll have to wait for the Awesome Sauce AA as well. In the mean time, maybe I'll go ahead with HDR and just leave AA off...

 

Check out our Super Sampling SSAA if you want high quality AA that works with HDR
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/37214

 

Super sampling SSAA is never going to be a realistic option for anything other than presentations in my view.

 

Has anyone had success getting Super Sampling SSAA to work with a two or three camera setup such as UniStorm or UFPS, or even better them working together? Once I add SSAA to one or both camera I get the hall of mirror effect.

I'm hoping the huge performance hit was a result of the issues I'm having, otherwise this is good for screenshots and that's it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Do you have the latest update of SSAA? There was a fix for multi camera problems a couple of weeks ago and we haven't heard any complaints since then.

 

Hmm, interesting... I updated just today. And I just reinstalled to make sure I didn't install the wrong version or something.

I've tried a couple different configurations with no success.

I'll try an empty project and slowly piece things together and see if I can isolate the problem better.


The visual results are less than appealing.

 

If you have issues with SSAA, please write us a mail at flowfire@inbox.com, this is the wrong place for support for our asset. We also just tested it with the latest UFPS version and it worked fine on our machine. Please send us some screenshots / details and we'll try to help.

 

The article was written more than 10 years ago. Can we get MSAA with HDR now please Unity. I worked on three shipped games already that had that feature, of course that was prior to switching to Unity engine, really annoying stuff.

While I'm at it, being able to choose alternate backbuffer formats (i.e. semi-HDR 10.10.10.2) would be even nicer.

 

this would be so nice for VR, come on unity!

 

Yes indeed. Not having this is really annoying, especially for VR development.

 

Working on VR too, can only agree and bump for visibility

 

1) Download Unity free posteffects https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/post-processing-stack-83912
2) Add "PostProcessingBehaviour.cs" on main Camera.
3) You should turn on "HDR" on main camera for correct posteffects.
4) If you have forward rendering path (by default in Unity), you need disable AA "edit->project settings->quality->antialiasing" or turn of "MSAA" on main camera, because HDR does not work with MSAA. If you want to use HDR and MSAA then use "post effect msaa".

For examples of this see this "Mesh Effects" asset: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/particles/spells/mesh-effects-67803

 

HDR and MSAA can be enabled at the same time since 5.6, about 4 months after the this thread originally ended.

However it is true that HDR and MSAA still do not play nicely and very bright objects can cause still cause aliasing to appear, and the features necessary to solve this issue properly hadn't been added to Unity until just recently.

Also, MSAA is a very specific kind of anti-aliasing, there is no such thing as a "post effect msaa". The post processing stack has options for FXAA, SMAA and Temporal AA. Temporal AA is likely the one you want to use as FXAA and SMAA aren't terribly effective for VR.