Render smooth edges... realtime antialiasing

[mjolnir]

Hey community. I follow the main forum daily, if not hourly and i've noticed that alot, if not most people who post stills of their W.I.P.'s and even finished works are still unaware of how to render or screen grab their doc without fixing the antialias first. Its actually really easy to remedy and you can actually model in real time with perfect antialiased edges, so i put together this quick tut for people who don't know. hope it helps.

Notice the edges and the default doc size...


Change the width and height to 1800 roughly... then hit "resize"


A "resize?" box will pop up telling you the operation is not undoable. Thats fine. Hit yes.


The new canvas will show your model ultra jagged... Just hit "ctrl N" to clear the canvas of subtools then redraw your model on the canvas. Hit "T" to drop it. I know in the image i called it a pallet... my bad.


Now hit the "AAHalf" button on your side options bar. Then Hit "F" to center your model.


Its essentially doubling the size of your document... and "AAHalf" is filling the canvas with the larger doc. You may get a little lag when modelling but it has never been enough to bother me... i prefer the cleaner view... but when rendering or sceengrabbing it will save you alot of hassle in ps. So, i hope this helps some people.... and cheers!

[Skadalilama]

Excellent! I think I read about this somewhere before but the visuals you provided emphasize the ease of this process. Thanks!!!

[mjolnir]

hey, glad to help.


in the tut, where i change the doc size... you could just hit "double" insted... it does the same thing. but there will be moments where youll want to put in your own parameters. so its good to know how to do that.

i think most people just screen grab and paste in ps for their quick wip posts... so this is quick and not too involved.

[Gary Komar]

Hi mjolnir i have made a similiar post here http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=78713 and try to spread the word here those jaggies bug me too ! to add as in my post if you have a really high poly model that is hard to position at that size document doubled you can position your model then mark it then double document size select model click on marker in resized document for same scale and position one click then aahalf and export

[mjolnir]

I feel ya. everyone wants a clean edge, you can tell cuz people spend so much time in ps trying to smooth them out with blur... its just not an obvious fix... But, most people dont realise that the aliased edges permeate the model... not just the outer edge. If you do it before you start modelling, it helps your perception of the work. i go nuts unless i fix it. its like a pebble in your shoe. drives me bonkers.

[VictorCS]

Thanks, I've tried to get this working myself, but never did. I cant believe how simple it is, yet so hard when you dont know.

"The new canvas will show your model ultra jagged..." <- That's where i got to, and thought, this cant be right ^_^

"Just hit "ctrl N" to clear the canvas of subtools then redraw your model on the canvas. Hit "T" to drop it." <- thanks for filling out the missing piece of the puzzle.

[Leona]

Thank you!

[CurtB]

Just an FYI for people that don't have top of the end systems, increasing your document size and getting up to a few million polygons will run much slower than if you just left it at default.

I usually sculpt in default document resolution and then resize once I want to present my model. I wouldn't recommend sculpting on an 1800px+ document.

Alternatively you can just do a BPR render and it'll antialias the edges for you.

[TonyV125]

I realize this is an old thread, but I've recently been trying to render a sculpt and get some decent output and came across it.

I've been upping my document size, just as explained above, but what I find most unusual is that the real problem with anti-aliasing resides in the edges of the model that are against the Zbrush background.

If an object's edge is in front of another object, then the edges are anti-aliased, but if there are no other objects behind the edge, the edge is aliased and jagged. I'm including samples of renders at the standard resolution and even a much higher resolution and both show this. I've been placing a plane behind my models to avoid the aliased edges, but I would prefer to simply have the gradient background without the plane.