Imported Entities glowing through different sheets
I've noticed off and on over the years an issue I've been having when I use various entities I've imported into my maps. I don't usually notice until I've finished rendering the final product, where an area of my maps will have these strange glowing spots showing up through transparent sheets I've set up. By chance while messing with a sheet's glow-effect, these bright spots were highlighted and showed exactly what entities were causing them.
The problem from there then is that I have no idea what about these entities is causing them to act like this, nor how I fix it show they stop showing up as glowing points on my finished product. My best guess is that it has something to do with them being imported in rather than being part of my currently selected catalog, though why this is different is beyond me.
Do people here have any ideas as to why it might be doing this, or how to fix it?
Comments
It looks like the imported symbols have some kind of halo around them in the png file. Have you opened them in a bitmap editor and checked if there is something there?
Any semitransparent part of a symbol might produce unexpected results if you use sheet effects on the same sheet as them. Do you get these strange circles if you switch the effects off on that sheet?
They don't appear to have anything when I open them up, perfectly transparent around them. And certainly none of them are in circular shaped thumbnails either.
For these images, they're all on the SYMBOLS sheet, which has no effects on. Where I'm running into issues is a solid-color sheet I have a transparency and "Edge-fade, inner" effect. When I turn this specific effect off actually, the glowing seems to stop.
It's an unusual problem.
Ordinarily I would say it might be Transparency Acne, but TA never usually creates large and perfectly sharp edged circles. Do they appear and disappear as you zoom into and out of the drawing in CC3 at all?
They do in fact appear and disappear as I zoom in and out. Which is partly how they've alluded my attention for so long. In regards to the perfect circle, that's more a combination of "edge fade, inner" and "Outer Glow" producing a weird effect. I was testing something with the latter, which I left off originally, which made the 'icon glowing' more prominent.
When you say you have a solid colour sheet, I'm assuming that's on top of those symbols?
What happens if you change the colour of that solid sheet?
Yes, overtop.
When I change the color... It doesn't appear to do it from the start with colors other than black [0], at least the ones I've been picking. Doesn't exactly solve why it's happening, but it may be a way around it for this particular map. I'll try rendering it like this and see how it turns up.
Black is the colour most likely to cause TA. That's because if you have so much as just one other pixel in the entire map that is also perfectly black, TA will happen. Try using the darkest grey, or the darkest of any of the other colours.
I see, thank you very much. Still curious as to when and why it triggers, but navigating the issue is a good outcome. Things look much better with your suggestion.
I think the first couple of paragraphs in this comment are probably the clearest way I have ever described the cause of TA.
EDIT: The solution I gave in this case would not work for your TA because yours is happening in a sheet that is expected to be transparent, so a backing sheet wouldn't work. the only thing you can do in this case is try to find a colour for that solid overlay that doesn't match anything else in the map.
TA can result in perfect circles if there's a very small hole in the alpha channel (one or a few pixels) and then an effect based on distance functions such as Edge Fade, Inner or Outer Glow is applied in such a way that it gets a hard edge. The distance function gives (as the name suggests) the distance from an edge to other points in the image: the distance from a point is a circle. At a sufficient distance, the projection of any group of points will be a circle; for practical purposes, one or a few pixels will project to something that looks like a circle over a distance about ten to twenty times the size of the pixel group.