Preventing banding when using AO (even with shadows off)

Is it possible to mitigate for this type of banding (it happens even with shadows disabled)?
https://media.giphy.com/media/JsbyqbQJMxaZAqmavH/giphy.gif

 

That's normal bias. Read up on any shadow artifacting sort of thing to get an understanding.

 

Thanks, although adjusting shadow bias (and even removing all lighting and shadows) has the same effect. I've also tried changing the camera FOV, multiplying/dividing all scales by 10x, and exporting my meshes as watertight. Nothing I have done have made any difference unfortunately.

 

What AO are you using?

 

Unity's PostProcessing V2 AO - Also want to note that it happens with any mesh (even the default primitives)

 

I've not seen this specific issue before with Unity's AO, but I have seen it with other engines. It's caused by either not enough precision in the depth buffer, or not enough bias in the AO sampling. To that end @brownboot67 is correct, but Unity doesn't offer any control over the AO sampling bias, and it's usually not needed. If you're using the Multi-Scale AO from V2, you might try playing with the thickness modifier, but I'm not sure if that will have much effect. The other option you could try is pushing the camera's near plane further away. That will significantly increase the depth buffer's accuracy, even increasing it by a small amount.

 

Thanks for the suggestions! We are using Multi Scale AO, and while the issue doesn't happen when using Scalable, the performance hit is not worth it for us (at least on Mobile). Adjusting the near or far clip planes have only a very small effect, and any value we try just makes the lines close/further apart but they are still there. I guess our only viable option is to bake the AO in Blender or similar.

 

Yeah, PpsV2's MSVO doesn't work well with the plane almostly facing camera on the narrow angle camera.
That leads acne, looks like fixed to the distance from camera(not the nonlinear depth value).

You can scale the value of "tanHalfFovH" in MultiScaleVO.cs to fake the fov for your specific camera.
It's wrong and changes AO itself, but reduces the acne anyway..