Weird dithering?

[snow crest]

I followed a youtube tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9g2LaBrirI) and I got this as a result. It looks very weird and completely different from the tutorial, does anyone know how to fix it?

[robust spade]

What is "weird" about it

[snow crest]

it shouldnt be colored

like the gradient from green to red

and the contrast is too high

I accidentally messed some stuff up and redid the dither shader, but this is what it looked like before

I followed the exact steps as before but it turned out different

[robust spade]

It doesn't make sense for Dither node to use the UV node as it's In(4) input

It's an error in the tutorial

Looks like it's not the only problem with it either

[snow crest]

what to use instead?

[robust spade]

First you'd want to start by posterizing, as dithering in this case is used to supplement posterization

Then apply dithering

Posterization biases towards darker colors for multiple reasons, particularly when your color steps are 16 or lower
It can be mitigated by using the manual posterization node setup with Round instead of Floor for example, or by doing gamma conversion before posterization and reversing it after, or similar

[robust spade]

Note that changing Render Scale will cause the Dither node to produce incorrect results, as the dither pattern will be based on the screen size after upscaling, which won't be correct

[robust spade]

I think the fix is that to make the Dither node's code into a custom function with an extra multiplier for screen scale, that you always match with Render Scale

As long as they match and the Screen Scale produces an integer screen scale it should work
Meaning typically you'd be using 0.5, 0.25, 0.2 or 0.1, but it depends on the Game window / application resolution
You'd want a script that checks the screen resolution and sets both the Render Scale and the ScreenScale property to a value that can divide the current resolution into a whole number value

[snow crest]

Thanks, it looks better

[snow crest]

do you know which values you used for the floats?

thats what I got right now

the colors are still a little off

the one on the left is what I have right now and on the right is what I had before I messed up

do you know how I can dither only on the "darker" parts while keeping the colors correct?

[robust spade]

"Messed up"?

[snow crest]

yes, a week ago I followed the tutorial I sent and everything worked fine (result in the right pic) and I accidentally changed something and saved my project

after that following the youtube tutorial didnt get me the same result

for whatever reason

[robust spade]

It's unexpected to me that anyone manages to follow that tutorial when it has such fundamental issues

[snow crest]

it somehow worked lol

[robust spade]

I made my solution into a package, which may help
It includes some default values, also has options to compensate for how posterization tends to affect darker colors disproportionately
Mostly an issue in linear color space I think

[snow crest]

youre the goat seriously

thank you a lot!

I got the dithering very close to the original

I need to "color grade" it a bit but I can easily do that via post processing

[robust spade]

You can choose in the Renderer Feature whether it'll be applied before or after post processing
Can't really have it "between" the post procesing effect I think
But one option is to do that kind of post processing in the shader itself either before or after the posterization

[robust spade]

You could do this by taking a Step or SmoothStep of the Sample Buffer, and using that as the T of Lerp in the last step where the effect is blended in