Resolved Screen space normals estimation from depth.

Hi, I'm experimenting on normal estimation from depth map to use it on some screen space effects with blit pass. So far normals looks ok, but I couldn't figure out what causing this faceted look. How can I get smooth normals? Blit pass is before post processing BTW.

 

You can't.

You're estimating the normals based on the actual surface geometry. The actual geometry is flat, so the estimated normals are too. The smooth surfaces you get when rendering a mesh normally are entirely a lie since it's ignoring the real geometry's normals and replacing them with arbitrary per vertex vectors that are being interpolated over the triangle.

The only way to get smooth normals is to render the mesh's interpolated vertex normals to a screen space texture, like Unity does when you enable the DepthNormalsTexture on the main camera, or when using deferred rendering.

 

Thank you for the explanation.