Hi Matt,
Adaptive local antialiasing or whatever the name is...
In games some GPU's can render specific parts in the scene (around object, around lines etc...) i think with higher AA settings.
I hope this is clear to understand.
Are there any plans to use something like this in Terragen?
I have a scene that renders mostly quite Ok with AA 5.
But some parts of an object needs AA 12 to get rid of flicker(small object parts with light shining etc).
I rendered those parts with crops at AA 12. This was faster in total.
But not so much to justify comping those parts and having to deal with 2 different set of layer elements
(as it is actually only the same with higher AA i didn't used those in the end).
So in the end i use AA 12 just for all the scene. It is a waste of time if there was a better way to get higher AA only where it is needed.
I don't know if the noise settings is technically something similar (i think not).
I just read somewhere that this (maybe there are different methods i don't know) might not always help for faster rendering. So just curious.
Matt has added the Robust adaptive sampler in more recent versions. I think this does similar, but you can't really define what it's going to adapt too. I don't think even games do this. They just use Z-Depth and I believe more AA at a distance, and less closer to camera. So LODs, or wires, trees, etc at a distance don't start pixelating, and remain smooth, but things close with larger edges against BGs and such doesn't need such aggressive AA.
With this sampler I was able to solve flicker in motion with a smaller pixel noise threshold for my stars, which is a pretty extreme example.
Thanks Jordan.