Smoothing Out the Rough Edges


By reducing the resolution, the Sub Sampling option increases the jagged appearance of your rendering. For your final rendering, you can improve the smoothness of edges and thereby increase the apparent resolution by using the Anti-Aliasing option in the Render dialog box. This option performs a kind of computer trick that reduces the jagged appearance of object edges. Anti-Aliasing blends two adjacent contrasting colors. This gives the effect of smoothing out the "stairstep" appearance of a computer-generated image. The improvement to your rendering can be striking.

Try the following exercise to see firsthand what Anti-Aliasing can do:

  1. Open the Render dialog box and then click the More Options button.

  2. In the Raytrace Rendering Options dialog box, click the Medium radio button in the Anti- Aliasing button group and then click OK.

  3. Select 1:1 from the Sub Sampling drop-down list and then click the Render button. The rendering takes several seconds, so you might want to take a break at this point. When the rendering is done, it will look similar to Figure 17.35.

    click to expand
    Figure 17.35: A rendering with the Anti-Aliasing setting set to Medium

Notice that the edges of the buildings are much smoother. You can also see that the vertical mul- lions of the office building are more clearly defined. One negative point is that the texture effect of the Facade model has been reduced. You might have to increase the scale value for the Granite Pebbles material setting to bring the texture back.

As you can see from this exercise, you trade off rendering speed for a cleaner image. You will want to save the higher Anti-Aliasing settings for your final output.




Mastering AutoCAD 2005 and AutoCAD LT 2005
Mastering AutoCAD 2005 and AutoCAD LT 2005
ISBN: 0782143407
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 261
Authors: George Omura

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