Moho Animation Forum

Havent happen to you that when you export an image having the proyect settings with the same exact resolution of the imported image, the final result is a little bit bigger than the original?

Most likely it's due to the processing that AS does on images. Man, how I would love to be able to turn it off, or better still, control its strength.

Rudiger wrote:Most likely it's due to the processing that AS does on images. Man, how I would love to be able to turn it off, or better still, control its strength.

What do you mean control its strength?

Well, it's some sort of anti-aliasing filter I think. It would be nice to have a parameter that you set to 0.0 for it to have zero effect and 1.0 for it to have maximum effect, with a default of 0.5.

I think that the extra width of the image comes from the 3D projection. There is a thread where it is discussed that the imported images are rendered adding a unneeded antialiasing effect and I think that it is due to the 3D projection.
Seems to be unsolved.
-G

The effect may be there, but will go completely unnoticed once your projects exceed a certain screen size. I work in HDTV and don't have any problems at all when exporting scenes back and forth to and from AS several times.

Maybe it's just me, but I have a great deal of trouble following Mike's logic in that thread.

He says, "OK, now here's the reason why it's happening. As The400th pointed out, Anime Studio, although it's a "2d animation program", is really a 3D tool. Every layer, plus the camera live in a 3D space. An image you import is initially positioned directly in front of the camera so that it looks like it's flat on the canvas, but it's really floating in 3D space.

What this means is, to render a scene, the pixels of an image need to be resampled into the final output image. Resampling is bound to introduce errors."

This is clearly not true as transformed images appear to not be resampled in the workspace, prior to rendering. There is therefore no logical reason why there can't be an option to treat images the same way during rendering.

He then goes on to justify always anti-aliasing images to avoid the "pop" effect you get when you animate from an anti-aliased, rotated version of the image to an non anti-aliased and non-rotated version. Um, why not just not anti-alias the rotated or non-rotated versions!?! Sure, the rotated version will look crappy without anti-aliasing, but that should be up to the animator and, um, who said the animator is definitely going to be rotating the image anyway!?!

I just don't understand why the bug wasn't just fixed on the spot instead of going to all that effort justifying it!

I'm with Mike in this point.

What you see in the workspace is NOT the original image - not even if, coincidentially, the blue frame is exactly the size of the image on your monitor.

Doing animation without scaling or rotating images is such a rare case that it doesn't justify additional code.

Anti-aliased ist the standard everywhere. Compare AS' output to results from AfterFX, Flash, TVPaint - it's as good or better.

If you really need non-anti-aliased results, try the old Director. Horrible rotations and scalings.

slowtiger wrote:I'm with Mike in this point.

What you see in the workspace is NOT the original image - not even if, coincidentially, the blue frame is exactly the size of the image on your monitor.

I beg to differ. If the blue frame is exactly the size of the image on your monitor, the image will only be passed through an identity matrix, so there should be a 1:1 match between the input image and output image. Out of interest I tried zooming out to get the blue rectangle to match the image size manually, and the image looked exactly the same as original.

slowtiger wrote: Doing animation without scaling or rotating images is such a rare case that it doesn't justify additional code.

Yikes, that's quite an assertion! What about backgrounds? What about if you want to use AS to composite or edit images or videos? Of course it would be the most useful if you could turn off anti-aliasing for individual image layers.

slowtiger wrote: Anti-aliased ist the standard everywhere. Compare AS' output to results from AfterFX, Flash, TVPaint - it's as good or better.

If you really need non-anti-aliased results, try the old Director. Horrible rotations and scalings.

I think it's silly to debate whether anti-aliasing is better than not anti-aliasing. It quite clearly depends on the situation, which is why it needs to be an option, like it is for vectors.