If you find this interesting, you might also be interested in this video of someone diving even deeper into how to make the dither surface stable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqGaIMVuLs
IMO, the holy grail of 3d dithering is yet to be achieved. runevision's method does not handle surfaces viewed at sharp angles very well. I've thought a lot about a method with fractal adaptive blue noise and analytic anisotropic filtering but I don't yet have the base knowledge to implement it.
My take on it is to use some arbitrary dithering algorithm (e.g. floyd-steinberg, blue noise thresholding, doesn't really matter) for the first frame, and for subsequent frames:
1. Turn the previous dithered framebuffer into a texture
2. Set the UV coordinates for each vertex to their screenspace coordinates from the previous frame
3. Render the new frame using the previous-framebuffer texture and aforementioned UV coords, with nearest-neighbor sampling and no lighting etc. (this alone should produce an effect reminiscent of MPEG motion tracking gone wrong).
4. Render the new frame again using the "regular" textures+lighting to produce a greyscale "ground truth" frame.
5. Use some annealing-like iterative algorithm to tweak the dithered frame (moving pixels, flipping pixels) to minimize perceptual error between that and the ground truth frame. You could split this work into tiles to make it more GPU-friendly.
Steps 4+5 should hopefully turn it from "MPEG gone wrong" into something coherent.
This really is a fantastic video. I don't think I'd considered many of the ideas behind dithering before seeing how it could be extrapolated to this degree.
The video ends in a place where I suspect even further advances could still be made.
Fair point, though I think that when it's low rez enough, it becomes less apparent that it's not in screenspace, and it gets closer to a retro look: https://youtu.be/EzjWBmhO_1E?t=102
If anyone finds this interesting, I'd like to plug my post analyzing a similar technique, but generalized for perspective pixel art: https://tesseractc.at/shadowglass
This is great from a technical and artistic perspective. But for me personally, the visual style ruined a great game. I love detective/deduction games. I'm listing some of my all-time favorites in this genre. I'd love to finish Obra Dinn, but god it just makes my eyes hurt so much.
I grew up on the small 6 inch 1 bit Mac SE display so the art style has a special place in my heart. Sadly I'm too "dumb" to fully enjoy the game as it requires a lot of attention to detail -- amazing if you enjoy detective style puzzles! I still highly respect it.
When the Mac and Atari ST first hit the market in the 80's, there were Comics created in this 1-bit "ordered-dither" style. For error-diffusion dithering (Floyd-Steinberg etc.), you needed more bits per pixel, to carry the error.
I keep feeling like there's a set of fundamental assumptions that can be optimized for, or relaxed and optimized for, in order to get at what a better method might be.
For example, stability of dithering under rotation and or some type of shear translation. What about stability under scaling?
There's been some other methods that essentially create a dither texture on the surface itself but, to me at least, this has a different quality than the "screen space" dithering that Obra Dinn employs.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this idea more rigorous? Or is the set of assumption fundamentally contradictory?
What a fascinating deep dive. 2x with sphere mapping is my favourite - it starts to take on a sort of pointillism-like quality which gives all the objects (or maybe my brain) a sort of understanding of their texture.
> Finding this particular spherical mapping took some time. There's no way to perfectly tile a square texture onto a sphere. It would've been possible to redefine the dither matrices in terms of a hexagon grid or something else that does tile on a sphere.
Hexagon grids are flat and can't tile a sphere. Nothing can tile a sphere without knowing some specifics about the sphere, and even then you're pretty much limited to "orange slices", pole-to-pole longitudinal sweeps.
I feel like I understand it all except the last step:
> I could feel the closeness, and a very simple fix for this kind of aliasing is to supersample: apply the dither thresholding at a higher resolution and downsample.
Here he shows a dither pattern that isn't monochrome, but has grays (cause it's downsampled). But the picture in the end is monochrome again. How does this work? How does he downsample the dithered result while staying monochrome?
I've never gotten motion sickness playing a video game before Return of the Obra Dinn. it's sad because I hear it's a good game but it's absolutely unplayable for me
> It feels a little weird to put 100 hours into something that won't be noticed by its absence. Exactly no one will think, "man this dithering is stable as shit. total magic going on here." I don't want to give people problems they didn't know they should have though so it was worth fixing.
I mean maybe it's just me, but that is literally the first thing I noticed and I appreciated it so much I instantly bought the game. I don't even play video games much!
59 comments
1. Turn the previous dithered framebuffer into a texture
2. Set the UV coordinates for each vertex to their screenspace coordinates from the previous frame
3. Render the new frame using the previous-framebuffer texture and aforementioned UV coords, with nearest-neighbor sampling and no lighting etc. (this alone should produce an effect reminiscent of MPEG motion tracking gone wrong).
4. Render the new frame again using the "regular" textures+lighting to produce a greyscale "ground truth" frame.
5. Use some annealing-like iterative algorithm to tweak the dithered frame (moving pixels, flipping pixels) to minimize perceptual error between that and the ground truth frame. You could split this work into tiles to make it more GPU-friendly.
Steps 4+5 should hopefully turn it from "MPEG gone wrong" into something coherent.
The video ends in a place where I suspect even further advances could still be made.
But yes, there's still the issue of oblique angles looking different that still remains open AFAIK.
The Case of the Golden Idol
Chants of Sennaar
Her Story
IMMORTALITY
The Painscreek Killings
The Roottrees are Dead
Type Help
Interesting read!
[1] https://dither.blode.co
[2] https://github.com/mblode/dither-3d
SHATTER:
https://imgur.com/gallery/shatter-1984-was-first-commerciall...
Robot Empire:
https://www.reddit.com/r/atarist/comments/xgs4rh/comicbook_c...
For example, stability of dithering under rotation and or some type of shear translation. What about stability under scaling?
There's been some other methods that essentially create a dither texture on the surface itself but, to me at least, this has a different quality than the "screen space" dithering that Obra Dinn employs.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this idea more rigorous? Or is the set of assumption fundamentally contradictory?
> Finding this particular spherical mapping took some time. There's no way to perfectly tile a square texture onto a sphere. It would've been possible to redefine the dither matrices in terms of a hexagon grid or something else that does tile on a sphere.
Hexagon grids are flat and can't tile a sphere. Nothing can tile a sphere without knowing some specifics about the sphere, and even then you're pretty much limited to "orange slices", pole-to-pole longitudinal sweeps.
I feel like I understand it all except the last step:
> I could feel the closeness, and a very simple fix for this kind of aliasing is to supersample: apply the dither thresholding at a higher resolution and downsample.
Here he shows a dither pattern that isn't monochrome, but has grays (cause it's downsampled). But the picture in the end is monochrome again. How does this work? How does he downsample the dithered result while staying monochrome?
> It feels a little weird to put 100 hours into something that won't be noticed by its absence. Exactly no one will think, "man this dithering is stable as shit. total magic going on here." I don't want to give people problems they didn't know they should have though so it was worth fixing.
I mean maybe it's just me, but that is literally the first thing I noticed and I appreciated it so much I instantly bought the game. I don't even play video games much!