Adding FXAA to T3D - Live Blog!

#21 Hey Tom, the heads up on Torsion 1.7 was also cool, thanks.
Nice live bloging!

#22 Tortoise 1.7 ( the SVN tool )

#23

Quote:I think the MLAA looks much better

MLAA will be left in the engine, but its just not enabled. You can easily go make it the default AA provider if you prefer it.

Also there are like 3 key values in the HLSL file that you can tweak to change its effect. You can get much less bluring if you want it.

Note FXAA is used in FEAR3, Duke Nukem Forever, Age of Conan, Crysis 2 (CryTek extended it to add temporal 2x supersampling), and Battlefield 3.

Quote:a noticeable loss of sharpness on textures not on edges

Since the technique is based on finding edges using color... it finds them everywhere including within textures. The zoomed in images are an exaggeration of this effect... if you swap back and forth on the original full sized image the change is very hard to spot. That said... it improves everything... including the shadow edges which is nice.

Reducing the blur amount or changing the tolerance in the HLSL file might help... but it is a full scene effect and not just on edges. I suspect he will release more improvements and maybe that is one area he covers.

#24

Quote: The zoomed in images are an exaggeration of this effect... if you swap back and forth on the original full sized image the change is very hard to spot.

I'm talking about the full images, I definitely notice a change in sharpness, though I think that may just be my developer eyes being hyper-sensitive to details.

Quote: That said... it improves everything... including the shadow edges which is nice.

I completely agree with this though, and like I said, even though I notice a loss of sharpness, it's definitely worth the trade for how well the end result runs (and a bit faster too). I'm excited to see this added to 1.2.

Quote:CryTek extended it to add temporal 2x supersampling

OK, they're just making up words and terminology now, aren't they?

#25 "So i've got this commited and it will be shipping with T3D 1.2 soon. Thanks for reading! "

any time frame on when T3D 1.2 will be coming out? I wouldn't normally ask but "soon" got my attention.

#26 their last "soon" took 1.5 years. (Yes I realize this post was useless. my bad.)

#27 Somewhere i read: 6+ months

#28 Soon is soon... the GG of today is not the GG of old.

Quote:temporal 2x supersampling

Here is the presentation on that.

The idea there is to add a tiny jitter the camera and use results from previous frames to pick up pixels that normally drop out because of highly detailed or alpha test geometry.

#29 Hey just looked again to this thread and noticed what EB says about torsion!= tortoise.

I meant to write Tortoise, sorry about the confusion :S

#30 ..I didn't want you to get false-hopes! ;)

#31

Quote:The idea there is to add a tiny jitter the camera and use results from previous frames to pick up pixels that normally drop out because of highly detailed or alpha test geometry.

Wait... so video games need microsaccades now? Talk about art imitating life!

#32 Great work Tom and +1 to those that say better looking and faster is a rare thing.

#33 Does anyone have the files for this? The community really needs FXAA!

#34 FXAA is already in the engine. I can't recall off the top of my head how its enabled though.

Edit:
Actually, I'm pretty sure FXAA is the default now and MLAA is the one that has to be enabled.

#35 Really? When was it implemented into Torque3D?

#36 It's been in there since the commercial 1.2 release.

#37 I probably am acting really dumb, but what was Tom doing then?

#38 He was adding it in to T3D I suppose. This is an old post, probably before T3D 1.2 was out.

#39 Does anyone have the files here? I really want his implementation of FXAA.

#40 I think whats in the engine is his implementation of FXAA.