RELEASED FLOWFIRE Super Sampling SSAA - Visually best Anti Aliasing!

Hello Unity friends!
We just released our SSAA - Super Sampling Anti Aliasing solution!






Super Sampling is bringing a high-end Anti-Aliasing and image quality improvement
solution to Unity!



SSAA takes only one minute to set up, comes with easy, convenient controls and scalable quality.
Just add the script to your camera and you're done!

Super Sampling provides outstanding image quality and removal of ugly jagged edges by
rendering in high resolution and scaling down the high information frame into a final picture,
providing not only Anti-Aliasing that is unmatched, but also a sharper and more detailed image!

Perfect for giving your users an high-end option, reviving an old game, superior visualizations or simply achieving the best image quality within Unity!




Click this image to view in full size

More Images:
All pictures are on fantastic with the same settings.










(Color grading done with our Color Grading Pack)

The effect is scalable from -0.5 to 2 and beyond,
take just the amount of performance you want!





Here we have the Unity FXAA3. If you are not using the very limiting forward rendering,
you may have noticed that your best Anti Aliasing option is FXAA3, a rather low-end
post effect not designed for quality, but high performance.



Following is MSAA 8x. Edges are better and not blurry, but it only works in forward
rendering and does not work with HDR (High Dynamic Range) MSAA also does not
correct specular / normal map / other aliasing (see blue image below)




Here is our SSAA at the suggested 2x multiplicator. Please notice how not only edges
and aliasing become far less of a problem and noise dissapears, but also how textures become very noticeably sharper and more defined.











SSAA works safely on Unity 4+, any platform and can be combined with
pretty much any effect, works on deferred and forward rendering and with HDR!

You can now have the the AAA look in Unity and it only takes 2 clicks to work!






Update 1.4
- New Ultra High Res screenshot + SSAA function!
- Support for Render Target Textures with SSAA
- Updated Documentation
- Added helpful Tooltips to the Script
- Various improvements

Update 1.3
- Added OVR (Oculus Rift) compatibility
- Various improvements & fixes
- Improved documentation

Update 1.2
New Features:
- Rewritten SSAA completely
- Improved Performance & Quality
- Support for scaling above 200%, use with caution!
- Added selectable filters to choose from:
-- Nearest Neighbor
-- Bilinear Sharper
-- Bilinear Default
-- Bilinear High Scaling
-- Lanczos High Scaling
- (New Interactive Web PreViewer)

Fixed issues with:
- Multi Camera
- Clear flags
- Ray Casts
- Various others

Update 1.1
New Features:
- Multi Camera Support
Fixed issues with:
- Transparency in forward rendering



Future update plans:
- Tell us what you would like to see!

Current known issues:
- Issue regarding uRecord Asset when its used over target resolution
- Viewport Rect
- Oculus rift issue (General Unity issue?)

Important:
Be very careful with mixing SSAA with MSAA if using forward rendering,
this can multiply performance usage and is pretty much redundant.

 

Heres a side by side comparison i made:

 

So, does this simply render the camera to an off-screen render target at 2x resolution and then blits it to the screen with a nice downsampling shader? If so, am I right in thinking that this will cause a 4x increase in pixel fill rate, absolutely killing performance? Or are there any smart tricks involved?

 

That's pretty much how SSAA works. It's really only for high end systems, screenshots, or games that are getting fairly old, or don't require a lot of horsepower anyway.

 

Battlefield 4 offers very similar SSAA and I can easily run 2x SSAA on my 2560x1550 screen,
and I would not call that an old or low performance intensive game.

Many players apparently use it at 1.5x - 2x and I am sure more AAA games will offer it in the future. Performance impact is a bit higher than 4x MSAA if im not mistaken, but it also looks
clearly better. You can scale the SSAA in the script just like in Battlefield, so you could
also just take 25% per example for far less performance impact.

You just mustn't couple it with MSAA , which is multiplying a mutliplicator, and that hurts.
( 2 x 4 = 8) That would be overkill, but many people do it per accident and then wonder
why the FPS dropped ; )

 

SSAA comes with a scalable strength, so it takes only as much performance as you want it to!

In fact, the big majority of games being released do not nearly leverage capabilities of middle class PCs,
and having a Super Sampling option does not only make the Users with decent PCs happy, will also heavily prevent
your game from aging as much and still look fresh a couple years down the road!

 

Update 1.1 is now live:
- New: Multi Camera Support - In addition you can now set the depth of the render target individually if desired
- Fix: Bug regarding transparency in forward rendering fixed

 

Useful asset!!!!

 

Glad that you like it! Consider giving us a rating : )

 

Another update coming soon!
Have a particulary nice SSAA screenshot ? Show us, we may promote your project!

 

Any plans on early bird discounts?

 

Edit: No there was no plan for a release discount regarding the low base price (and the asset already being released for some time), im sorry.

You can pick it up for 13$ or 11 Euro currently which we have chosen to be
affordable for anyone.

 

I'll answer my own question then, since you didn't: No.
Good luck with the sales!

 

I bought this today - very nice

 

Very nice scene, glad that you enjoy it. Foliage and transparent textures are one of SSAA's biggest strengths

 

We are currently working on the next update, if there's anything specific you wish for, tell us and we'll see what we can do ; )

 

What are you planning for the next update ?

 

We had planned to improve functionality with multi camera setups further (for complicated FPS setups and such) and add other selectable sampling algorithms which would offer different results.

 

I'm trying to use this with oculus, but once enabled the head tracking no longer gets updated any Ideas?

 

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.

 

demo?

 

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

 

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

 

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.

 

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 960*540 and I have the uRecord scale factor set to two to give a 1920*1080p recording resolution. It seems like the SSAA takes the 960*540 resolution as opposed to the uRecord 1920*1080p resolution, and the SSAA produces an output image of resolution 960*540 which uRecord then upscales to 1920*1080p 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.

 

@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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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!

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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

 

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

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

Okay, just wanted to make sure my post effects were being supersampled as well, thanks for the fast response. Looking forward to the next update with the new algorithms.

 

The next update is gonna bring a lot of stuff and hopefully a very nice web viewer with two scenes and all AA methods to compare in real time. As with every bigger product update (not including bugfixes) we will slightly increase the price to reflect the new value of the product, so if you want to save a little bit, now is a good time!

Update v1.2
New Features:
- Rewritten SSAA completely
- Improved Performance & Quality
- Support for scaling above 200%, use with caution!
- Added selectable filters to choose from:
-- Nearest Neighbor
-- Bilinear Sharper
-- Bilinear Default
-- Bilinear High Scaling
-- Lanczos High Scaling
- (New Interactive Web PreViewer)

Fixed issues with:
- Multi Camera
- Clear flags
- Ray Casts
- Various others

ETA: 2-4 days

 

You can now have a sneak peek at the new web viewer!


(A close up shot of the viewer scene)

http://www.flowfiregames.com/#!ssaaviewer/c1thf
http://www.flowfiregames.com/#!ssaaviewer/c1thf
http://www.flowfiregames.com/#!ssaaviewer/c1thf

 

That looks amazing. I can't wait!

 

Update should be live in 1-4 days.

 

Just downloaded the update, the new filtering modes are great. Is there any update on the uRecord compatibility? I noticed that the filter shaders are exposed, is it possible to manually set the output resolution of the texture? Though that only helps of course if the protected SSAA shader is supersampling from the correct resolution.

 

Did you try it with uRecord again after the update? It worked on our free uRecord version. You can not manually set the output resolution, that would not work like you imagine it I think, either way. We are still looking into it, likely have to make out something with uRecord authors if it does not work yet with 1.2.


Update 1.2 is live!

New Features:
- Rewritten SSAA completely
- Improved Performance & Quality
- Support for scaling above 200%, use with caution!
- Added selectable filters to choose from:
-- Nearest Neighbor
-- Bilinear Sharper
-- Bilinear Default
-- Bilinear High Scaling
-- Lanczos High Scaling
- (New Interactive Web PreViewer)

Fixed issues with:
- Multi Camera
- Clear flags
- Ray Casts
- Various others



Check out the new web viewer!
http://www.flowfiregames.com/#!ssaaviewer/c1thf

 

Just tested it, unfortunately it still doesn't work When using uRecord you need to set the 'upscale' amount above 1. The video will end up being pixelated.

 

Ah thats too bad, then the free version is maybe different than the full version, as the free version looked fine.
We will try something else then, keeping you updated if something changes.

 

Thanks Flow Fire. I'm pretty much ready to render my trailer now, just need nice smooth edges from the SSAA. Did you try it with upscale set to 2, editor resolution set to 960*540, and edit>project settings>player resolution set to 1920*1080? From what I remember the free version is identical save for a logo or something.