Baking on a 2D plane aliasing

Shrike · Nov 2014

Hey guys, I am baking all kinds of full 3D stuff on flat planes as sprites, and I have some issues with aliasing.

I bake at 4x Hardware AA from xNormal and still I get this super edgy contours.

This is a aliasing sample of a 2k texture, and I know i can render out a 4k or 8k and then sample it down in photoshop, but Id like to know what causes it, and if theres a different solution ?

I could use edge padding for the normals but still I have the problem for the color pass, which is my alpha mask and needs to be pristine. Edit: Well essentially the question is: How to surprass aliasing when using no edge padding ?

I feel like I forget about something, any ideas ?

respawnrt · Nov 2014

When you bake, export with the hipolies a simple plane that sits in the background. I think that should fix any problems including baking the mask.

JedTheKrampus · Nov 2014

Just use the old axis-aligned directional light trick and do a regular render with antialiasing.

http://www.bencloward.com/tutorials_normal_maps11.shtml

JedTheKrampus · Nov 2014

I also figured out how to get a render with perfect antialiased alpha edges in Blender using no axis-aligned lights, but the normal pass from the compositor. It took some fiddling with the premultiplication, but I got it done. Obviously you'll have to make changes for your own renderer and compositor, and if you need normals in world space you'll need to make further changes.

Shrike · Nov 2014

Oh wow, baking right out of the 3D app is a huge time saver, didn't think of that

Used a normal shader that is linked there with 0.5 gamma (for anyone using C4D reading this ..lol) http://planetpixelemporium.com/tutorialpages/normal3.html

Looks exactly like Xnormal in engine, but now with unbelievable AA and I can even bake proper AO right out, making this all so much easier YEAH

Thanks a lot guys!

Farfarer · Nov 2014

Bear in mind that you probably don't want pre-multiplied anti-aliasing on this (i.e. you don't want it blending to a black background). Otherwise the fringes of your sprite are going to wind up having incorrect normals and you'll get some strange looking artefacts around the edges.

Try baking out with a plane behind the mesh that's aligned to the camera, then you can bake out a separate alpha mask. Although, ideally you'd have some kind of edge padding that would be applied to the normal, but not the alpha.

Baking on a 2D plane aliasing

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