Moho Animation Forum

Hi,

I have searched for a solution to my problem in this forum, but I'm not sure I used the right terms. I hope somebody can help me with my problem, and I'm sorry if this has been discussed before.

I have made an animation, and no matter what I try, the outlines of the character have little edges in them. Here is a link to my dropbox, where you can see the anme file/ mp4 of the animation. You can see the rough edges very clearly on her right upper arm when she moves.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bbvghl3uqztc ... vkzAa?dl=0

I tried smooth edges, round caps and exporting the file in different formats. Nothing changes.

Does anybody know how to solve this? I would be so thankful for any tip!

Thanks!

Are you talking about the slight aliasing? TBH, It's really not that bad on my screen. Other than that, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

If it is the aliasing you object to, make sure both Anti-aliasing and Extra Smooth Edges is enabled. If that doesn't improve the anti-alisasing, I'm not sure what else you can do as the AA options are kinda limited. (I have issues with it myself in higher contrast situations.)

Just curious but are you looking at this on a Retina display? Recently I discovered that my web comics looked terrible on a Retina display even though they looked perfectly fine on a standard LCD display. It turns out that the Retina display is more sensitive to compression quality. After increasing the compression quality in my comics and re-uploading them, they looked fine on the Retina screen.

I suspect maybe you need to increase the movie quality for rendering? In any case, it does look a bit 'soft' for some reason.

Hope this helps.

Yes, I guess I am talking about the aliasing. Both Anti-aliasing and Extra Smooth Edges are enabled. For size I used HDTV 1080p, and I exported it to QuickTime ProRes 4444. Would you recommend another format? I also tried mp4, ProRes 422 and Quicktime Movie H.264.
I was afraid somebody might tell me that there are no more options, since the program has its limits. But thank you anyway for your reply!

About your question:
I'm looking at it on a standard LCD display. Interesting how stuff like that can have an effect on the look of the animation.

Yeah, I think you're doing all you can.

In general the AA in Anime Studio is pretty good but it can have issues where there is extreme contrast, like fully black lines against white or near white colors. For such extreme cases, I wish we had another level of AA, maybe even variable AA controls like the ones we have in 3D animation programs.

As it stands, if I see a bad aliasing problem, I'll render a separate mask pass from ASP for compositing in Fusion or After Effects, isolate the edges in a mask (using a Sobel filter or some other outlining method), and then add a little blur to the aliased edges. It's extra work to be sure but fortunately this hasn't been a common problem for me.

If you don't want to go through that much trouble, you can add a slight global blur but I don't really recommend that--if you have detailed textures, it will soften them as well.

Another option is to run the frames through a filter like Retouche or OLM Smoother. OLM is free and it will even work with movie files in AE. I would recommend processing individual frames though--it will be faster, more controllable, and require less RAM.

Other things you can try: use color edges and fills that contrast less with each other, or use thicker lines which may AA more easily. Naturally, on commercial projects, you often can't dictate design decisions so this not always possible.

Alternatively, you can render the animation at double the resolution and then scale it down in compositing or editing. Depending on the program you're using, this should effectively give you a higher level of anti-aliasing. Where quality is concerned, this is probably the best option but it also means your final renderings can possibly take four times longer. I would use this as a last resort and only for the worst situations. Personally, I've never had to do this but it's good technique to keep in mind.

Hopefully, we'll see more robust AA options in the future.