Dithered transparency that changes over time?

Development Rendering
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1

I’m interested in experimenting with dithered transparency effects in materials. I’ve tried the included “DitherTemporalAA” node on the material opacity mask, and it’s nice how simple it is to set up, but I noticed that the effect is only a static screen space dither pattern, and there’s only two patterns (random and non-random).

What I’d like to try is a dither pattern that changes over time, such that the pixels being masked or not are continuously changing. For a “random” pattern it might look more like video noise, while a uniform pattern might progress, well, uniformly.

I’m also interested in trying different dithering patterns. I could even imagine something like offset vertical or horizontal lines being a fun pattern to try.

I only have rudimentary knowledge of working with material graph so far but if anyone could help me figure out how to achieve this or point me in the direction of some helpful resources I’d appreciate it!

2

You can double click the node to open it up and see how it works.

The custom node is creating the non random checker pattern, which animated over 5 frames of I’m not mistaken (going by memory).

The noise is a texture, which is fully static in screen space. In the past, I’ve replaced the texture with a flipbook of noise so I could animate it.

I’m not sure the end result was strictly better but it’s easy to do if you want to try it out. Just make a copy of the TAA node so you can experiment without messing up the original.