Aliasing made better?

I’m not sure if this is the right place, but I’m trying to make a game with a minimal art style, cubes and rectangles and such, but all the parts of my art that are at an angle are really horribly aliased. How can I fix this? Thomas was alone does this beautifully, is there some way I can replicate that level of smooth?

Is the aliasing still poor when using the play options? TXAA should kick in and help.

FXAA is really all you need if there’s always going to be a sharp contrast between the shapes and backgrounds, and TXAA is (from what I understand) a mix between that and some temporal aliasing methods to smooth out the motion as well. So if your style is similar to Thomas Was Alone, you could downgrade your AA and still get a good result. But for the added smoothness with motion, TXAA and keeping the game running at 60 frames per second is probably going to be your best bet.

So it’s currently set to TemporalAA, the only other options are FXAA and none. Is Temporal AA just another name for TXAA, and if so why isn’t it helping? Even when I package the game and play it on my desktop it’s pretty jagged. Do I need to do something besides set it in the project settings?

Are you playing at a lower resolution, or smaller screen percentage? Make sure you’re rendering at the full resolution of your monitor, or disable fullscreen so it’s not stretching the image. Hit tilde ~ to open up the console commands, and type “setres 1920x1080f” to toggle fullscreen and play at 1080p HD. Change the numbers to whatever resolution you want but make sure if you’re playing low-res you’re not doing it fullscreen to make sure you’re getting an accurate quality reading. If you want the full resolution of your monitor, then go fullscreen and try that out.

Also, the benefit of TXAA only happens in moving scenes. Try switching to FXAA to see if that fixes the problem. Typically FXAA blurs a lot, so if that’s the effect you want, you can try it.

I tried that, it’s still the same level of jagged, both fullscreen and windowed at high resolution. Any other ideas? It doesn’t even seem like its antialiasing at all, like the settings have no effect

A screenshot might help us figure out whats going on.

Make sure that screen percentage post process setting is 100%.

Temporal AA is NOT TXAA. TXAA is Nvidia’s solution, the Temporal AA in the UE4 was developed in-house for the infiltrator demo.

You can read about how they did it here:

It also goes over a few known flaws in the technique and some possible solutions.

The biggest flaw with FXAA in the engine is that it sometimes breaks screenspace reflections. Other than that, it does give much sharper, frame accurate results, where the Temporal AA blends between frames (mostly only noticeable on animated materials or particles). In most cases, Temporal AA will look better, if a little on the blurry side sometimes.

I’m not sure why you’re not seeing it, is Realtime enabled? It should be the default setting. Also make sure you’re running the editor at high/epic settings, it might be disabling it for performance reasons even if the antialiasing’s performance hit is almost nonexistent.

How do I check if Realtime is enabled? I am running at Epic settings with 100% resolution scaling.
Here’s an ingame screenshot with TemporalAA “enabled” and all epic settings and 100% resolution scale:


It’s all pretty smooth, just not the angled parts like the floor, the character, etc.

Are the assets in that 2d or 3d? If it’s all 2d, maybe give FXAA a try. It doesn’t look like there’s really any texture detail to blend, it would probably work better in this case anyway. And it’ll be realtime no matter what if you’re currently playing or simulating it, and it looks like you are so that shouldn’t be a problem.

They’re all 2D, but it doesn’t even seem to be applying antialiasing at all. Using the ingame console commands to switch it around does nothing, having FXAA on does nothing, I clearly am missing a setting checkbox or something but I have absolutely no idea what

In the editor, go to Edit > Project Settings > Engine > Rendering, there’s a list of default post process effects that you can turn on or off, and the option to switch between Epic’s proprietary temporal AA to FXAA. The only other solution I can think of is to make a global post process volume, check so it’s unbound (as in, the volume is triggered as soon as it’s attached to the level, not when the player enters it), and change all the AA settings in there. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what to tell you.

Now, I fiddled with the AA to test how well it performs on both polygons and textural/alpha aliasing and found that Epic’s AA was a much better solution every single time. FXAA did blur textural detail a bit more than Epic’s temporal, but the blurring was largely unnecessary. Epic’s AA is just the right amount of blurring in the right places to prevent stair-stepping. For some reason it doesn’t seem like AA is turned on in your project at all! I’m not sure why this is.

If you have a post processing volume you can use it to overcrank the screen resolution. This will give you some quite nice looking anti aliasing. Try it at 200 percent - higher values can crash the editor so save first.

I looked up a tutorial on Global post process, and none of the settings shown in the video show up when I click on the global post process… I feel like this is a personal problem and I screwed up big time somehow lol no idea where or how though.