tutorial | Anti-Aliasing

Posted on April 21, 2009 by Ana Lutetia | 26 Comments

According to the wikipedia, Anti-Aliasing is

In digital signal processing, anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution signal at a lower resolution. Anti-aliasing is used in digital photography, computer graphics, digital audio, and many other applications.

For me it’s the difference between a pixelized image and a perfect image. By default and until yesterday, I never had any issues whatsoever with Anti-Aliasing but now I have to use the Anti-Aliasing features in the SL™ to cope with this issue. I have seen lots of pictures in the SL™ feeds showing pixels… Mayhaps, people simply don’t know how to solve it or maybe they haven’t noticed it yet. So, here’s a quick and dirty way to solve this issue.

Can you tell the difference between these two pics? If not, click on the images for full size and look at the arms more closely. The first pic doesn’t have Anti-Aliasing (or AA) and the second does. That’s why you won’t see an ugly pixelized line around the avatar or rough edges (in the second pic).

These images are unedited and using the same WindLight settings.

The way to solve this issue is to manually increase the value of Anti-Aliasing in the Hardware options of the Preferences menu:

However, when I do that, using the normal Second Life® viewer, this is what I see:

… but it’s working perfectly in the Cool Viewer (as you can see by the previous blog posts).

Category: Fashion World of SL, FashionFeedofSL, InQ Connections, MV-SL-Technical, MV-SL-Tutorials, Planet SLBazaar, Second Life®, tutorial / tips and tricks

Comments

26 Responses to “tutorial | Anti-Aliasing”

Allegory Malaprop
April 21st, 2009 @ 10:33

Heh, or option 3, turning antialiasing on crashes out SL . It’s substantially heavier on system resources.

(I’ve noticed the black photo thing is back in a number of occasions lately. Isn’t that just awesome?)
Ana Lutetia
April 21st, 2009 @ 11:04

Allegory Malaprop → meh! *shakes fist at issues*
Should we reported that damn black thing? This time was the opposite: I could only see what was going on in the snapshot preview as my SL viewer was totally black. o.O
Irie
April 21st, 2009 @ 12:34

When i tried it on 8x, it actually worked for me, i had no black screen at all, but i couldnt see any difference between my two snapshots. I take usually high rez snapshots to disk, so maybe it works only for normal snapshots. I tried, but still – i dont see the difference…
Ana Lutetia
April 21st, 2009 @ 13:26

Irie → I love your style post but your pics are suffering from AA isues. Maybe updating your graphics card driver? (I have a post in draft about it). Or trying the Cool Viewer?
I have posted before about high quality snapshots. I think…
Nuala
April 21st, 2009 @ 13:28

Thank you so much for posting this tutorial!
Mouse
April 21st, 2009 @ 14:05

Once again, you have provided a great tutorial for us all. I have anti aliasing on the majority of the time now, however, about this time last year, I was driven to the Nicholas viewer because it simply would not work on my MAC. I don’t know why suddenly it works for me – when it simply would not before!
Ana Lutetia
April 21st, 2009 @ 14:12

Mouse → Probably for the same reason that it stopped working for me all of a sudden and I bet we will never find out.
BTW, there’s a Cool Viewer for MAC. Even Nicholaz recommends it.
Sunshine Kukulcan
April 21st, 2009 @ 15:05

For starts, anti-aliasing can put a HUGE load on your graphics card and cause crashing. Secondly, check your individual settings for your graphics card, NOT just the settings in your SL viewer.

Most of the time, the additional high-rez settings of the type shown here are ONLY used for photos, unless you have a VERY high-end machine. I have 3 (yes, 3) Nvidia GTX280 graphics cards running in SLI on a dual quad core machine, and can run anti-aliasing at 16x. However, in very graphics heavy areas, even I will crash.

YMMV. (Your mileage may vary)
Ana Lutetia
April 21st, 2009 @ 16:22

Sunshine Kukulcan → I was crashing before AA as soon as I hit the snapshot button. meh! The settings of my card are letting the 3D application choose the best settings. Those settings are the settings I used for the photos seen.
Thanks for the input. Any ideas on how to solve this? Suddenly, I am seeing pixels where I didn’t seen before.

This post was also written to make people realize that they could improve their photos inSL… I could point fingers and get the message deliver but it wouldn’t be helpful at all.
Lizzie Lexington
April 21st, 2009 @ 20:38

I have been using these features for a couple months now and the black screen seems to be a random phenom for me. It happens now and again but its annoying as hell when it does happen! Sometimes when I spin my camera it gets rid of it but not always. Hopefully this will get fixed at some point.

Thanks so much for this write up. I love it when you share your knowledge with us!
Lizzie Lexington
April 21st, 2009 @ 20:40

Oh i just read Sunshine’s comment and now i have a question. I upgrade both the settings on my graphics card and in SL. Is this really necessary I wonder?
Ana Lutetia
April 21st, 2009 @ 20:41

Lizzie Lexington → Thank you for stopping by!
Whenever I find a new thing, I blog about it. I keep find new stuff about SL thanks to all the amazing bloggers out there.
Ana Lutetia
April 21st, 2009 @ 21:20

Lizzie Lexington → well, it’s not bad to have them both updated. I always have everything updated.
Lizzie Lexington
April 21st, 2009 @ 21:22

Oh hey Ana. Yeah it doesnt seem to effect my PC’s performance to have both running on high settings but sometimes i forget to up the settings on my graphics card. I have a control panel similar to the one SL has.
Ana Lutetia
April 21st, 2009 @ 21:24

Lizzie Lexington → Like Sunshine said, only use the high settings for pics. For regular SL™ living lower settings are great.
The hills are alive… « Monologues
April 22nd, 2009 @ 08:43

[...] obviously haven’t followed Ana Lutetia’s anti-aliasing tutorial so my pictures look like crap, but you should. And I promise I will [...]
Casandra Shilova
April 22nd, 2009 @ 14:41

I had noticed, and hate the pixelated look. Thank you sooo much Ana
Kaete Guisse
May 9th, 2009 @ 18:49

For some reason.. antialias no longer works for me… when trying to take high res photos… i have to use my ‘current window’ size… to benefit from it at all…i’ve upgraded drivers, restored my system… checked my nvidia control panel.. and nothing works.. GeForce 9800 GT/PCI/SSE2<<< the card im using…according to torley.. antialias no longer works for high res photos in SL.. but i refuse to believe that lol.. anyone else having trouble?
Ana Lutetia
May 10th, 2009 @ 18:32

Kaete Guisse → I downgrade my drivers to 178.13 instead of using the latest ones. I take my pics at 3200×2400 or something like that.
Kilted Up and Struttin’ « Sugarrlicious
May 15th, 2009 @ 22:35

[...] Regarding my photographs, I cannot use the antialiasing setup on cool viewer as mentioned by Ana Lutetia – it just makes my view black. Soooo, if my pictures seem a little wonky that might be why. [...]
Voshie Paine
May 15th, 2009 @ 23:07

Actually you can do this directly on your graphics card and works a LOT better than the SL one, and you shouldn’t run the risk of crashing as much when switching, and it will always be on. You go into your graphics card setting and you need to switch the anti aliasing to GLOBAL settings and decide which Xx works best for your card. Mine isn’t the greatest and is set at 4x and I have no jagged edges. Sl anti-aliasing seems to strain your card a lot more, and having global overide produces the same effect as doing it through SL. Just remember to relog after changing your card settings and you will immediately see a difference, and WON’T lag out as you do with SL anti aliasing.
Ana Lutetia
May 16th, 2009 @ 15:59

Voshie Paine → Thank you! Somehow, I am back using my ‘normal’ settings which are no AA settings in SL or in vid card settings. SL is weird!
Designer Deanimator
December 13th, 2009 @ 18:08

YAY!! i just today realized that there is such option and the difference is great!

thanks for the tip.. i didnt recognize the difference until u pointed out
Sugarr Delight
January 3rd, 2010 @ 16:30

I don’t know why i didn’t try this sooner. When you originally posted this, my old computer couldn’t handle it but I never thought of trying this with my new one until today when I bought no alpha lashes and thought they looked pixelated and weird. I remembered this vaguely and hunted this up and omg the difference is amazing. Thanks for this useful and easy tip
Ana Lutetia
January 3rd, 2010 @ 19:46

Yay! I am glad I’ve helped. When you see it, it’s a huge difference, isn’t it?
However, I have a more recent tutorial on this: http://analutetia.com/2009/12/26/tips-tricks-turn-on-anti-aliasing-insl/
tips & tricks | turn on Anti-Aliasing inSL : Ana Lutetia
January 3rd, 2010 @ 20:29

[...] comments Ana Lutetia on tutorial | Anti-AliasingCouture Conundrum » Blog Archive » Day 2: Clean Slate on interview | Barnesworth [...]