Camera frustum values affect aerial perspective

[Neptilo]

It seems that changing the camera's near or far parameters affect the result of the aerial perspective effect. Is this normal?
In my understanding, the camera perspective matrix is only used to retrieve the original world positions of each pixel on the screen.

Here is a minimal reproduction example, where the camera's far value is set to oscillate, and we see the knot object blinking as a result of the aerial perspective effect: aerial-perspective+changing-frustum.tsx
This occurs both with and without log depth buffer.

Reproduced from version 0.13.2 of three-atmosphere, up to today's dev version (so at least 0.14.0).

[shotamatsuda]

No, it's not normal. The reason why the aerial perspective oscillates is that the changes to the camera's near/far are not applied to the uniforms used in post-processing effects (the values in the depth texture do change but its interpretation does not). It must be manually updated given the postprocessing architecture.

camera.far = 3000 + 1000 * Math.sin((phase += 0.1))
camera.updateProjectionMatrix()

// Effects must know the camera near/far change.
composer.passes.forEach(pass => {
  if (pass.fullscreenMaterial instanceof EffectMaterial) {
    pass.fullscreenMaterial.adoptCameraSettings(camera)
  }
})

The 3D Tiles Renderer story does this because GlobeControls automatically adjusts the camera's near/far, whereas other stories don't expect them to change, thus they omit it. That said, it's definitely better to be mentioned in our documentation.

[Neptilo]

Thanks! This clears things up.
In the meantime, I found that calling pass.mainCamera = camera could also be used as a workaround. But I guess your solution is more appropriate.