How do you fix a line that is pixellated?
Tonnichiwa
🖼️ 16 images Surveyor
Hi guys,
I've been searching for a way to fix this but I cannot seem to find anything that can really help.
I've got a street that I am trying to build. But any time a line is put on it, the line always seems to pixelate. I wanted the line to look really smooth, just like a real line in the street would look. But CC3+ always seems to draw the line in short little segments that don't want to line up very well without looking like the line its self has shifted to one side or the other.
Here is a picture of what I am talking about. Notice how the yellow line does not have smooth edges? Any ideas how to make it look more natural? Like a line painted on the street normally looks?
Thanks for any advice.
I've been searching for a way to fix this but I cannot seem to find anything that can really help.
I've got a street that I am trying to build. But any time a line is put on it, the line always seems to pixelate. I wanted the line to look really smooth, just like a real line in the street would look. But CC3+ always seems to draw the line in short little segments that don't want to line up very well without looking like the line its self has shifted to one side or the other.
Here is a picture of what I am talking about. Notice how the yellow line does not have smooth edges? Any ideas how to make it look more natural? Like a line painted on the street normally looks?
Thanks for any advice.
Comments
The usual way to combat this problem is to use anti-aliasing. CC3(+) has an option for this in the export dialog. What anti-aliasing does is that it blends the colors of neighboring pixels to create an effect that make angled lines look more natural to the human eye. It is still noticeable if you zoom far enough in, but it looks much better. Try an anti-alias setting of 25% or so.
A slight blur effect can serve the same purpose.
I am just really surprised it turned out like that because I usually don't have a problem with this sort of thing. What is worse is that if I add a blur effect to it, before it actually makes the boxyness of each little line go away, it will blur the line so bad that the road just looks yellow instead of like gray cement.
You could change the anti-alias setting further, although this will affect the maximum resolution you can export it as.
I've always used that technique to take advantage of the bicubic downsampling, which does away with all the usual pixilation problems - antialiasing on a grand and spectacular scale that beats any other technique hands down.
Don't think I've ever uploaded a map either here or at the Guild that hasn't been bicubically downsampled by at least 50% from the exported original. Most are only 33% or 25% the original. Because I do it that way I don't even use the built in antialiasing in CC3, which means I can export an image up to 10000 x 10000 pi, and it actually be that big, rather than having to compensate for the built in antialiasing by reducing the size of the export.
Hope that makes sense
Bitmap graphics are pixelated. That's what they are - a rectangular patch of pixels that happen to generate a picture of some kind.
Vector graphics are not pixelated because the vector is a straight line through virtual space between two virtual points. They only look pixelated on the screen because the screen itself is just a giant animated bitmap, and therefore pixelated.
To get over the pixilation of vector drawings caused by exporting them as bitmap graphics (png, jpg, etc), you need to export them at about twice the size you want to end up with. For example Merelan City was always exported at 5000 x 5000 pixels from the CC3 map, and then this exported bitmap was opened in CorelDraw and scaled down to 2500 x 2500, or 1250 x 1250. The method used to scale down a bitmap image usually involves something called downsampling, which has the effect of super-antialiasing any ragged edges.
I'll go prepare an example. For some reason MC is taking a bit longer than usual to open up, but I won't be too long I hope
You do get a couple of advantages by doing it manually though, like being able to select which algorithm to use, and easier to experiment since you don't need to render it for each try if you start with a big enough export in the first place.
Still trying to get Merelan City to cooperate so I can produce an example....
Rendered directly from CC3 without any antialiasing..
[Image_8511]
Rendered directly from CC3 with 60% antialiasing...
[Image_8512]
Rendered at 2.5 times the size without any antialiasing from CC3, and then downsampled in Photopaint to the same size as above...
[Image_8513]
Perhaps this wasn't a terribly good example, since there is so much going on in this map, but I can see the last map is somehow sharper than the equivalent export direct from CC3 with the 60% antialiasing. I may, however, be biased in my view
To give you all a more clear picture of what is going on, I got contacted by someone who saw my stuff over in the commissions thread and asked me to produce a map for them. They wanted me to make them a map for a zombie apocalypse type game based off of a map from Google Earth, and they wanted to be able to edit the map later. So they bought CC3+, CD3, SS1, SS3, and DD3 so they could edit the map in CC3+ and also so they wouldn't see any red "x" s when I finally send them the FCW.
Everything was going great, until I ran into this little problem here. It isn't going to look so great if I send them the FCW and the map has that nasty looking line in the middle of the street like that, so I'm looking for ways to fix it.
Assuming that is the case, then even though they will see the ragged effect on the screen when they open the FCW file, they will already have seen the antialiased jpeg you send them first, and then once they have been taught how to export the bitmap properly with an appropriate amount of antialiasing (about 50% by my reckoning for a reasonably smooth result), they will only see that ragged edge in the FCW, and not on any of the exported bitmaps - the bitmaps being the product, and the FCW file being merely the tool that will allow them to modify the product.
This on-screen jaggedness while viewing the CC3 file is just part of using CC3. You could if you like mess around with the resolution settings in CC3 itself. That might give them a better image, but its really something that can't be changed. Screen resolution is only 96 pi/inch, and that's just how it is *shrug*
I wouldn't go any lower than 50%
I only have to do a couple of passes, even when I do the full 10,000 x 10,000 pixel render out!
That really doesn't sound right at all.
This is one of the reasons I export without antialiasing and then do it in Photopaint or GIMP - CC3 really slows down badly with a lot of antialiasing going on.
btw - when you increase the antialiasing, don't forget that you have to reduce the size of the export so that the actual limits are no greater than 10,000 pixels in either direction.
And thank you everyone else for all of your suggestions and questions.
I did that ages ago to get a render artefact to vanish on my Merelan City map. Ralph told me how to do it.
I think Tony might need to do it to cut down on his '86 passes', but I don't know if he's using CC3 or CC3+ (if that makes a difference)
I also can't remember where the instructions went to, to be able to tell him where it is and which number to add the zero to!