How to render Jagged edges on Sprites

#1

Using Maya - Mental Ray or standard software - how can I render a totally aliased edge, preferably with anti-aliased interiors of the sprite?

Ultimately for colour key, but at least to create an alpha in the rendered image.

–magilla

#2

Hmmm, well with 3ds max it’s pretty easy. A single checkbox to not anti-alias against the bkg. Sorry, I don’t know how to do it in Maya. Although maybe you could render out to an alpha-support format and turn off Pre-Multiply for the alpha, then tweak that to extract the aliased edges.

#3

Here’s an old thread that talks about pre-multiplied alpha, FWIW…

#4

Not sure if you’re still around, but…

Another way would be to render with AA on, then in an image editor you can threshold the alpha down to get rid of the AA… only problem would be that since you need to threshold into the alpha, the silhouette will be slightly cropped from the original silhouette of the model.

#5

I had previously used the alpha gain in After Effects, but this was for someone who doesn’t know how to use AE - and I was sure there must be some way of doing it straight out of the renderer.

thanks for your help, the premultiply replaces the composite, which I could no longer find, but I still haven’t found the solution for Mental Ray.

–magilla

#6

While we’re on the subject, does anyone know if it is possible or feasible to do real-time anti-aliasing inside of the game?

#7

Yes, many graphic cards accelerate anti-aliasing. Some look OK, but sometimes it can decrease the framerate.

#8

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