Fix for transparent hair with TAA off

[Tazor]

I see this problem in every modern Unreal Engine title. Seems like Cyberpunk also has this issue. I hate TAA. It makes everything look blurry. I disabled it from a .ini file. Overall the game looks better. However it makes the edges of character's hair look weird. Pixelated and transparent.

I will take the vanilla Skyrim hair over this mess. Any fix? Any mod that changes the textures?

[Rennox]

You basically turned off AA of any kind.... and if you're doing it on all unreal engine game, then that is your problem why all edges have a jagged messy look. The fix is to not disable TAA, and turn on one of the 3 AA types...

If you have an Nvidia card and want native res and no blurry upscaling nonsense, use DLSS -> DLAA
If using AMD, XeSS will give you better less blurry image quality.
If using FSR, then I can understand why everything looks like a mess for you to turn off AA altogether lol.

[Tazor]

Originally posted by Rennox:

You basically turned off AA of any kind.... and if you're doing it on all unreal engine game, then that is your problem why all edges have a jagged messy look. The fix is to not disable TAA, and turn on one of the 3 AA types...

If you have an Nvidia card and want native res and no blurry upscaling nonsense, use DLSS -> DLAA
If using AMD, XeSS will give you better less blurry image quality.
If using FSR, then I can understand why everything looks like a mess for you to turn off AA altogether lol.

No. It's not just jagged. It's TRANSPARENT. You can sort of see right through the hair. This isn't case in the example of Skyrim I gave. Where hair is solid even on the edges.

I got AMD. Not using XESS or FSR.

Overall the game looks better. Sharper. Clearer. WITHOUT TAA. The major issue is the hair.

[Rennox]

Sorry I thought the pixelated mess with AA disabled is what you meant with hair also looking transparent somewhat.

shrug no idea. Yes everyone knows TAA is a blurry mess, basically as bad as using FXAA

[DahMainahGaimah]

It's an intentional rendering decision.

Basic explanation: most modern games use a rendering method called deferred rendering. The awesome thing about deferred rendering is that you can have hundreds of dynamic lights on screen at once with very little impact per light. The downside is that traditional anti-aliasing is unwieldy, and transparent textures are difficult to implement well. So, CDPR decided to use TAA to smooth out transparent objects such as hair and foliage over multiple frames. They also use temporal accumulation for shadows, which is why local soft shadows can look grainy without TAA.

The only solution I can think of may be to force forward rendering (AKA traditional rendering) on hair, combined with modifications to hair rendering as well as each character's hair mesh, so that their hair is rendered only as discrete polygons. There's also a debug rendering option that allows you to force MSAA, if I remember correctly. All of these changes WILL require WolvenKit and external software like Blender, and WILL NOT function completely as intended. They will likely cause some performance loss as well, since forward rendering does not play nicely with tons of dynamic lights.

I hope this is helpful, and not too demotivating.

[Tazor]

So this is with AA disabled. Notice how sharp everything looks. The dress, the reflections on it, the jacket sleeves, the nails etc. The mod I have also disables SSR (the fog in the background), supposed to help with artifacts but it doesn't seem to make a difference. HOWEVER notice the terrible hair and fur. This is the big problem with disabling AA.

https://ibb.co/pvhpB4C

And this is with the default AA enabled. Looking at the reflections on the dress makes it look as if the textures are not done loading in. As if the game is rendering at 720p instead of 1080p. Plenty of other situations like that. The hair and fur look better, as intended.

https://ibb.co/cDZ52g3

[DahMainahGaimah]

Yeah, this is as intended by the developers. Deferred rendering does not support transparency, so the pixelation you're seeing is what's called a dither pattern. It's only applied to the fur and hair, because those are the only assets in the scene that they need to try and fake transparency for. When TAA is enabled, they try to use frame blending to smooth out the fur and hair.

[Tazor]

Originally posted by DahMainahGaimah:

Yeah, this is as intended by the developers. Deferred rendering does not support transparency, so the pixelation you're seeing is what's called a dither pattern. It's only applied to the fur and hair, because those are the only assets in the scene that they need to try and fake transparency for. When TAA is enabled, they try to use frame blending to smooth out the fur and hair.

Looks terrible. Wish there would be a mod that makes all the hair and fur solid. To get rid of this issue.

[DahMainahGaimah]

Just opened up WolvenKit. Do you mind if I add you on Steam so we can discuss this in a chat?