Tackle Antialiasing in shaders?

Watching this very intereresting Unite 16 talk by Zerolight and the speaker suggests optimizing antialiasing by doing it with shaders. This is new to me.

Is anyone aware of any examples, on github or elsewhere, of anti aliasing accomplished via shader code?

 

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/65509

 

"Anti-aliasing in shaders" is a big topic with lots of different use cases and techniques for different situations. Post process based AA like FXAA, SMAA, or TAA could be considered full screen shader based AA. You can also do in shader super sampling when rendering surfaces (common for text rendering), or analytical approaches using distance fields (also common in text rendering). There's also several techniques involving special processing of normal maps and smoothness maps to do specular and diffuse anti-aliasing. And there's UV manipulation like RetroAA which is a very special case for reproducing the look of hard edged pixel art but maintaining the benefits of texture mip mapping and reducing aliasing.

 

Watched the video. He's talking specifically about this paper:
http://alex.vlachos.com/graphics/Alex_Vlachos_Advanced_VR_Rendering_GDC2015.pdf
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021771/Advanced-VR

There are a ton of different ways to pre-process your texture maps to get essentially free specular anti-aliasing, and the Valve approach is one of them. There's also CLEAN mapping, Toksvig AA, and precomputed vMF used in The Order 1886. That last link has a nice little demo application which you can toggle between several different specular AA techniques.

The Alloy Physical Shader Framework asset for Unity I believe has the option to use precomputed Toksvig.

 

Awesome info, thanks! Any idea if Alloy is useable on mobile(Android, OpenGLES2 or 3)?

 

No idea, try asking them:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/alloy-physical-shader-framework-version-3-for-unity-5.305178/

 

@bgolus
Slight correction. Alloy used to use Toksvig AA, but we switched to the approach used by "The Order" when we switched to using a GGX-based BRDF.

 

Awesome, I hadn't seen Alloy switched over to GGX & vMF.