Is there a way to turn of Poser's anti-aliasing? Yes, I know that sounds like a bizarre request. But I'm working on creating sprites for a very old game that can't interpret partial transparency, resulting in all my sprites having an unsightly magenta border. I can fix it by hand, of course, but I'd rather find an alternative. :/

I'm not sure if there's a real time preview way of doing it from within Poser but you can always force AA in your video drivers.

not that sure, but I would set Pixel Samples (in Render Settings) to 1.

As far as I understand, this is the AntiAlias setting. 1 means 1x1 AA, 4 means 2x2 AA and the ultimate 36 means 6x6 AA.

But I don't have a clue how Poser deals with prime numbers :-)

Thanks I'll give that a try.

Quote - As far as I understand, this is the AntiAlias setting. 1 means 1x1 AA, 4 means 2x2 AA and the ultimate 36 means 6x6 AA.

Actually, setting pixel samples to 36 results in 36*36 = 1296 AA samples. It's not obvious from the dialog, the number you type is the number of sample steps on the x and on the y axis.

yeah that's what I thought for years, but since 6x6 AA is sheer overkill already and the slider max showed 36 I twisted my mind into the more reasonable interpretation. Also the manual (PPro2014, page 438) says that a higher number comes with proportionally higher render times. So I though; perhaps this max means 6x6 instead of the rediculous 36x35.

Bang, this is Poser Universe!

Back to my original understanding then. Perhaps someone can fix the manual as well as the slider. 4x4 is the max one really needs for fine print, in my opinion.

Thanks a lot, by the way. 

When you render with strong depth of field or motion blur, those high sampling numbers may become necessary - if you're not using those features, then high numbers are certainly not required.

Since FireFly is decoupling shading and visibiilty*, antialiasing comes in comparably cheap and in doubling the number of samples will not automatically double the render time, as opposed to a ray tracer it does not need to do any extra shading.

*exception: progressive mode, then FireFly runs as a 100% ray tracer.

stewer,

I just like to get this a step further, for the sake of all users facing this Render Setting. First of all I asume the motion blur refers to stills, since I don't see a use for high level AA in animation. Please say so if you think different.

At any reasonable monitor (85-100 dpi), any nuance above actually 2x2 but lets say 3x3 AA gets lost in the color bleeding of the R,G,B dots which make up the pixels.
In a very good hires print (200-300dpi), any nuance above 3x3 but lets say 4x4 gets lost in the color bleeding of the ink droplets within the paper.
In other words, above 2x2 to 3x3 the medium presenting the image actually is doing the AA for you.

For that reason, I don't see a practical application for Sample Rates above 4. There is just no way to make the effects visible. Unless focal / motion blur are doing something special, which I like to learn about...

Pixel samples do much ore than just Antialiasing. I can't post images right now (I'm at siggraph), but if you try any scene with depth of field at different settings for pixel samples, you should see the difference right away. 

Motion blur is important for movie renders too and is a "must have" feature for any render engine in the movie industry. Film and video cameras in real life also show motion blur, so movie renderers try to match that look.

Click it for full size. Compare with the next one.

Click it.

yeah, I didn't have time for tests at the moment but this is what I figured. It hurts. I'll stick to Z-depth and Object renders and blur in post. Sorry for that.

Stewer thanks for explaining, BB thanks for renders.