Hi All,
In the older days when i made 3D text and added a reflection map the edges all looked lovely and smooth even when the text was scaled down to a small size. As long as the sampling was set to around 8 all was fine. Now days I’m finding the edges on my text go really crunchy and ugly and i cant seem to get to the bottom of it. If i look at the the text in 3D view it looks lovely but when i switch to Live preview it looks awful. Maybe its my mac i don’t know. Its not a show stopper but if anyone knows a fix i’d love to hear any advice. TIA
Hardware AA or software AA? I would push the software AA under action node prefs. That should do the trick.
Hi Sinan, I have upped the Software AA to 64 with no real difference. I’m going to do it in C4d but curious to know if anyone else has had this issue.
The 1st image is in 3D view the second is a preview software AA set to 8. Doing my head in.
Is your HWAA cranked?
There is also a Matchbox you could try post comp. It’s called HWAA or something. It’s helped me in the past.
The 3D view will show an unrendered-to-pixel image and thus have perceptually higher resolution. Once rendered you would see the actual pixels in your target resolution. But I agree there is a lot of aliasing on the preview or rendered image.
Also check your softness parameter under soft AA… I think it defaults to 0.5, increasing it may result in a better image.
I can’t actually reproduce this with AA8. What platform are you on? Also, what are we looking at in respect to font size and screen magnification?
Maybe adaptive degradation is on? It can be wonky. I find it works differently if the axis is selected or when the 3d text node is selected. It might even be a bug, but I don’t use it so I can’t really say. Select the axis above the 3d text node, set the adaptive degradation to “Do Not Propogate Degradation” and “Disable”, then Apply to Selected.
Is it set to progressive source? Maybe you’re interlaced by accident?
I have found the problem and it’s something probably i should have known. The 3D text needed to be pinned to a panel so In order to do this i used a perspective grid. The perspective grid parented to the 3D Text made it crunch really badly. I’m sure there’s a completely logical explanation but i wont be doing it again that way. I’ll pin if need be downstream if it needs a nudge. As always thank you all for your help. It’s always these comments that make you think harder to resolve the solution.
“I ain’t getting on no 3D plane”
Great debugging. Question:
Was the perspective grid in 2D or 3D mode. I’m guessing 2D. Does it look better if you change it to the other one? It might not look the same of course.
Just tried it in 2D as it was in 3D, its no different the type looks awful. Id be interested to know if this happens for anyone else incase its my mac.
This is a great catch. It behaves the same way on Linux as well. I think the perspective grid has its own transformation for its child hierarchy and the sampling sucks.
We definitely need some more options on the Perspective Grid:
- Sampling algorithm and parameters
- Smoothing workflow for stabilizing. Currently I duplicate the original PG, call it PG1, remove jitter from the duplicated one and call it PG2, create another one PG3 and write an expression to remove the jitter: PG3 = PG1 - PG2.
- Overall adjustment layer for individual corners, like Edit Track channel on the perspective/bilinear surface.