Baking on a 2D plane aliasing

Shrike

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

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

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

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

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

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.