ADR-61: Blur Effect For UI

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https://adr.decentraland.org/adr/ADR-61
Authors:
brianamadori
JuanMartinSalice
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Context and Problem Statement

For many of the UI designs, a blur effect to generate a glass-like effect was proposed.

A technical design for this effect is described in this document.

Proposed Solution

The blur effect works by using a custom RenderFeature. This render feature uses the Opaque Texture provided by the Forward Renderer pipeline. This texture contains a snapshot of the Forward Renderer pipeline output and can be used as an input so the effect knows what is on the screen on advance to be able to blur it.

The render feature takes the opaque texture and blurs it using two passes--horizontal and vertical--with a reduced resolution to achieve a smooth-looking gaussian blur effect with fewer passes than an ad-hoc fragment shader approach.

In some cases, the blur has to act over other UI elements. For this to be possible, the UI elements that will be blurred have to be rendered by using a canvas that's set to "Screen Space - Camera" so they are included in this opaque texture to be used later. "Screen Space - Overlay" canvases are not blitted to the opaque texture, so those canvases can't be used as the blur source.

In a nutshell:

Alternatives

At first, a simpler ad-hoc fragment shader based solution was considered. This fragment shader just uses a single pass gaussian kernel over the screen space opaque texture provided by the forward renderer. The issue with this technique is that as the source is not already blurred or low-res, so it needs a lot of iterations to be visually appealing. This turns out to be inviable and very detrimental to GPU performance. With low iterations, "ghosting" artifacts were observed so the better alternative was chosen instead.

License

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0-1.0. DRAFT Draft