OK... here's the problem.... Have an image (large-ish size, large-ish dpi), the default render took 6 hours to render on the PC at work .... the antialiasing part of the render however may take a few days on top of that .... and I have several of these I need to do .... Can the effect of antialiasing (the smoothing/blurring of edges) be faked is the question? At the moment, all I can think of is to render at about twice the size (without AA) and then scale the image down to the desired size and let the old resizing (bicubic) interpolation do the rest. This should be a lot faster than waiting for the AA. Or maybe render at twice the size (without AA), apply a little gaussian blur (a pixel or less) and then resize down. Anyone with any experience at this? Anyone with any ideas?

I usually render twice the size and rescale with bicubic interpolation, works quite well and saves a lot of time. And several images, hmm..., if we continue our death match through 2005 I think I'm going to win again :-]

Heheh, I may be able to give you a better run for your money (and 5000 beers) this year ;)

Re-sizing should work Flak. You may have to use unsharp mask in Photoshop afterwards to bring it back into focus. It may be a little blurry otherwise.

Still, you're talking about massive data and detail loss. My guess is that you'd be better off trying to optimize the scene a bit... The resizing method doesn't in any way equal AA, edges will still be pixellated, etc. What kind of scene is it? What kinds of lights are in the scene, etc? Volumetrics? Volumetrics are the most easily optimized of all Bryce's materials...

2d transparency mapped image planes (lots of 2d planes) and soft shadow enabled sunlight. Hnmmm.. bears more thinking.

edit - And just found out this morning (about 30 mins ago) that the printer wants a smaller dpi than what I was led to believe, which may cut the whole process down to only a day per AA run, which may be acceptable enough to me.

Message edited on: 01/28/2005 17:32

Aye, methinks that perhaps your Sof-Shadow sun is killing your render times? I know you already know this... But perhaps try a light dome, or Zenith by Madmax, or the wonderfully simple 5-spotlight SS method? (cross-posting hell!) Well good luck, any way you do it, and we'd love to see the final image if they will allow you to show it.

Message edited on: 01/28/2005 17:34

I've had render times blow up before when using lots of transmapped 2d planes (even with normal lighting) - I guess all the transmission and that really add to the number of calculations, and with soft shadows, it just gets worse. May give a small light setup a go... off to find zenith thingy on HDD.

Flak, I dont know if you need these sequences as stills or animation frames. If they are to be anumation frames, dont use AA! The motion of the animation will cancel out the fine work. Bicubic resizing is good for most general graphics work but if you have lettering or many straight lines in your work then bilinear is the better option. It is always good to double your size. If youre doing CG for games, work at 1024x1024, these sizes will be taken down to 512x512 or more often 256x256 in the gaming engine therefore larger bitmaps would resize down better than having to resize up. If your work is stills, then yes AA is essential even if it has to be faked. Lets face it, most people wouldnt know it were AA in post work or during production unless you told them. Usually, unless youre very good at post work, will people be able to tell the difference.

I disagree with Quest on this one, and always have. I know it's not for animation, but if it WERE : Your final animation is only as good as it's input source files. If you're doing web animation, no AA might be okay. But if you're doing film like I have been, you'd never, EVER get away without anti-aliasing. Compression doesn't make up for AA mistakes. And did you see one single pixel in the Matrix, or on Gollum in the LOTR? Nope, not one. Do you think for one second that compression is what made those movies so clean?

Okay, apparently LSD doesnt understand the concept of animation as far as clarity from frame to frame goes. Sorry, by I have done much animation and am very much aware of what the gives and takes are. Broadcast animation is 30 frames per second (fps), in one second, the viewer will see 30 frames! Try to understand this concept. The eye is not quick enough to register the subtle differences. Imagine for a momenthere in the US electricity pumps here through at 60 Htz. In that amount of time you cannot physically see the flicker between the frames. It fools the eye into believing a continuous stream of motion. I will argue, that in that amount of time30 frames/sec you would not see whether any given frame was anti-aliased or not. On that theory relies an awful lot of works! For still image, yes, AA is very important. For motion, depending on how you plan to compress the stream but not every frame.

Aye, I suppose if you're JUST talking about edges, then that would work. When it comes to texture clarity and quality, though... Totally different ballpark. (grins... don't make ME post screenshots...)