koobas.hobune.stream
Terrain system trees slightly sharpen and blur depending on camera rotation
Hello, I've attached a video with the weirdness. I've only noticed it on mobile devices (iOS and Android), but it's possible it happens on other platforms to a smaller degree.
Example: https://youtu.be/BHeHmqD53A8
Basically, if I rotate the camera at all, the billboarded trees suddenly sharpen. Then when the camera stops rotating, the trees suddenly become blurry after half a second. Position doesn't affect it, only camera rotation. Maybe it's some obscure shader optimization trick? Maybe it's only affected by mobile graphics APIs? Any idea where to look would be extremely appreciated, thank you!
In general, it looks to me like one or the other (or both?) of dynamic batching and mipmapping, potentially combined with anti-aliasing (and all in response to a billboarded shader).
If it's related to dynamic batching, then it would be the scene rendering, having to transform vertices in varied ways (removing batching from the trees), then realizing when you stop moving the view around that they can batch together again after a moment.
If it's related to mipmapping, it's a possible explanation for why the trees change so much visually. They could be reverting away from lower-detail versions while actively readjusting, then reset their mipmap level after going idle for a moment.
If it's tied to anti-aliasing, then it could be related to a specific way that the mobile pipeline handles anti-aliasing in general (again, waiting until idle to process a static view a single time).
Regardless of the actual reason for the resulting appearance, it does seem plausible that it's tied to something attempting to improve efficiency when rendering for a mobile platform.
Do you have any post-processing active?
I'm not an expert but from the video, it looks like it might be influenced by DoF or motion blur, or even the fog that seems to be in that area.
I have two legacy image effects on the camera, namely Bloom Optimized and Vignette/Chromatic Aberration. That's a good idea, I will have to try a build with those off.
For those following, I turned off all image effects and the problem persists. Also this is a mobile-only problem.
How about spawning a prefab of the tree, and checking whether the problem still exists, instead of using the terrain system tree painter. By doing this we will know where the problem exists.
