Individual surface AA settings, when 1.0 isn't good enough...

[asmith47]

Dear Wavers--

What do I use? The lightwave manual is classic on this. In the surface panel, you can set a thingy for AA on the particular surface. It says something like "the default of 1.0 is almost always great unless it ain't in which case you may have to change it"

but to what they do not say! 1.0001? 1.1? 11? 22? 3.1415926? Negative Infinity?

I am getting the "shimmering" they speak of, tried 2.0 and it looked almost as bad. I wish they could at least say somthing like "if you are getting shimmering, set it to a value around 10" or whatever. I am rendering it a 4.0 right now, but I would really like to know if anyone has experience with this and can give me a reasonable value just to start off with before tweaking it anyway!

I am using super duper high enhanced extry good aa in the camera settings already...

Using 6.

Thanks for any help that may keep me from needing the kind of AA that has twelve steps to it :)

[asmith47]

PS, the surface is a control panel graphic that loads as an image sequence. I have several blocks of color on a black bg and some lines and they are shimmering a lot. This is a texture that may need to be shown in shots that range from reasonably close up (1/4 screen or so) to far away. They are rendered out at 640x480 and the final render is to D1. Some of the lines are 1 pixel, but they are not causing the real problems, they even show up! It is some 5-6 pixel black spaces between blocks of color and some lines about 4 or 5 pixels wide that are causing all the trouble. I am thinking of batch processing the image sequence through PS with a blur filter. Is this a valid approach?

/at wit's end with this :confused: