No AA Brush

[BigBoiiiJones]

I've reported a bug where any line set under 2px with anti-aliasing disabled results in broken, poor quality rendering. You can see the discussion here:
https://lostmarble.net/forum/viewtopic. ... 1cc66ce42a

This issue makes working in Moho with anti-aliasing turned off quite difficult. While you can work around it during the compositing stage, that's an unnecessary extra step especially since Moho should be able to handle this natively. Hopefully, the LostMarble team is looking into it.

Now, you might ask: why disable AA in the first place? In most Japanese animation workflows, anti-aliasing is applied during compositing in After Effects using plugins like PSOFT or OLM. Additionally, if Moho ever adds traditional coloring tools or raster/bitmap support, turning off AA would be essential since aliasing can interfere with clean fills.

Anyway, enough rambling and let's get to the point. I’ve created two simple brushes that effectively bypass this rendering issue. They work with AA enabled or disabled (within the Project Settings tab), and you can go as low as 0.9px before lines start breaking again. These brushes also align with the width (pixels) more closely with Clip Studio Paint's default curve tools/G-Pen, which is a big plus for users like me who switch between both programs. With these brushes, 1px in Moho is roughly 1px in CSP.

That said, there are still subtle differences since Moho handles AA differently, so some strokes might look chunkier or thinner in places compared to CSP. Still, it's much more consistent than before.

You'll need to tweak a few brush settings to get this working properly; those are shown in the screenshot below. Apologies if the image is small I captured it on an ultrawide monitor.



Download Link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Pkwzhs ... p=sharing]

Edit: Just want to note this works with 1080p and up. Lines start to break again when lowering resolution to 720p, 480p, etc... so needing to increase width (pixels) is required.

[Greenlaw]

Hi BigBoiiiJones,

+100!

When I was with DreamWorks, it was common for me to receive 2D footage with no anti-aliasing, making it much easier to key elements and apply effects in compositing (using OLM and similar tools.) At one time, I was able to do this with Moho footage, but not for the last few versions.

Your custom brush sounds like a clever workaround, and I can't wait to try it out. Will let you know how it goes.

Thanks for sharing it!

[Greenlaw]

Hi!

I tried the brushes and they're not quite working for me.

When I render the lines, they appeared to be anti-aliased slightly, even when I had all AA options disabled. That didn't make any sense, so I took a closer look at the brush art, and they both have slightly anti-aliased edges, and this shows up in the renders.

So, in my testing, the result may look more correct in the Working Area display, but it's not really rendering with no AA. Shoot.

This is an interesting idea, though. I want to try a few things along this line, and will let you know how it goes.

[Greenlaw]

Here's what I tried:

I loaded the No AA Brush 1 file into Photoshop, comped it over a while background, applied a posterize filter on top, and set it to 2 levels (black and white only.) Then I saved this as a new brush.

The result looked better for the thin lines, but the thick line in my test looked like it had some AA. This didn't make any sense, and I wondered if this was because the file was a normal 24-bit image.

So then I tried this: I converted the image to Indexed so there would ONLY be 2-colors in the file. The result I got was this...



As you can see, it looks better, but the thick line still looks like it has AA. Actually, on very close inspection, even the thin lines have some AA in them.



I think my brush is still 'flawed' though, because I resaved it as a PNG from Photoshop, so it might still be a 24-bit image or at least an 8-bit grayscale. I'll try to save it as an indexed PNG and see what happens.

[Greenlaw]

Shoot! It doesn't look like PS can save an indexed PNG. If I have time later today, I'll try something else.

[Greenlaw]

I'm not sure this will work. I think Moho is applying AA at some level not covered by the regular AA options. Maybe at the brush rendering level? If so, finding the right brush format might not matter.

This is probably a separate issue from the broken lines problem.

Also, maybe the brush image is just too huge, and maybe Moho is doing some internal sampling before applying it. 4096k seems unusually large for a Moho brush. Will try using a more typical size (256k) later and see what happens.

If anyone here gets to this before me, let me know how it works for you.

[BigBoiiiJones]

I'm not sure this will work. I think Moho is applying AA at some level not covered by the regular AA options. Maybe at the brush rendering level? If so, finding the right brush format might not matter.

This is probably a separate issue from the broken lines problem.

Also, maybe the brush image is just too huge, and maybe Moho is doing some internal sampling before applying it. 4096k seems unusually large for a Moho brush. Will try using a more typical size (256k) later and see what happens.

If anyone here gets to this before me, let me know how it works for you.

Awe shucks I swear it was working on my end, I didn't notice this. I'll also perform a bit more testing because for me this is a very important issue. I did notice that this doesn't happen with lower line width when AA is disabled in project settings but when it's enabled the artifact does appear. It seems to start applying aliasing when you go above 2.7 width but normal line seems to work around this range when disabling AA in the project settings. It's not perfect but it's still better than default and OLM and PSOFT plugins still work since it's still mostly no AA. It's rather unfortunate. Hopefully we get an official fix for both standard lines and brush lines