I'm using Poser 5 The Poser renderer seems to have problems rendering small images. Even the normal view window looks better than the render version. By small images, I mean zoomed out pretty far, where a full character is about 130 pixels tall, without any anti-aliasing. I have to use the old Poser 4 render option because the Firefly renderer is even worse, puting lines through the background color (very bad when making game graphics). The main problem is that there are little glitches in almost every render. Like 2 pixels that are totally off-color on a shoulder or leg. Does anyone know of any programs or plugins, or just a way to improve this? Any help is MUCH appreciated. Thanks, Jiia

why not just render it at a larger size and then resize in pshop or what ever paint program you may be using

I would have to pixel-resize with no anti-aliasing, and that usually means missing eye balls and such when scaling at such a level. Thanks for the suggestion though

Try saving images as png's - this will leave the background colour transparent. You can add the background in your paint program. That might solve the lined background problem. I use this option to produce Poser 91*91 pixel thumbnails in Poser 5 and it works for me. Why do you turn off anti-aliasing?

Why render with no anti aliasing? Are you using color key for your transparent color? Can't you use and alpha map? Which 2d renderer are you using? Try Gapi draw (www.gapidraw.com). Best2d renderer in the industry, does super fast alpha and IS FREE with no license agreement. Just mention them as the renderer. Try rendering real big, reducing with anti alias then select around the figure and set that to your chromakey color. You'll still get hard edges but the interior will be smooth. Pick a nuetral color for rendering on like grey or blue or green. Grey is good since it doesn't leave a funky blue or green halo around the figure when antialiased.

Mason-> I'm using my own 2D game renderer. It also does alpha and supports image alpha-masks (like PNGs). The problem is that this game has super-mega-tons of frames for each character. So each character will use 8 bit images with their own palette. If I give them all alpha masks for every frame, it will double the size to 16 bit. Becco_UK-> The Firefly renderer places garbage in the background color, even when saving as PNG. This can be seen if you take a FireFly render into a paint program and use FloodFill without any tolerance adjustment. It's fine for art renders, but not good for games, where I would have to filter 1000's of images for 100's of characters. I'll probably just have to accept the glitches and just touch-up the important frames (like walking/standing) manually. I still appreciate the help though, Jiia

So do you have a color key that you use for each frame? If you are doing your own renderer you can do things like drop your color count to 64 (6 bits) and use the last two bits for alpha. That gives you 4 alpha levels. But still, even if you are chromakeying you can still antialias the art when shrinking then just create a hard edge around the art and set the outside to your chromakey color. Also check you firefly settings. You can try different settings of the gaussian, box post filtering and the pixel precision for post filtering. Also, you can save the frames as TIFFs or PSD files and use the alpha layer as a hard edge maker to create the chromakey area. Also you should check out JPG 2000. It does things like allows you to lossy compress the image layers but lossless compress the alpha layer. Plus it super compacts the files.

I would consider that, but it's practically impossible to save an 8-bit image with an alpha mask out of a paint program. I would also have to disect each pixel thats drawn in my drawing code, or do some mask (pixel & 0x0F) or whatever. There's also another problem with anti-alaising. At the scale I render, it usually ends up just making the images look blurry. All of the texture turns into a mess. Thanks for the help though