icky line textures

i am trying out harmony standalone, and i have the following results from trying out the pencil tool’s textures. the 4 at the bottom seem to look ok (charcoal might repeat with a hard edge abruptly and quickly, too), but most of the textures seem to have a problem with the size of the texture – it repeats poorly and/or just looks oddly scaled up and artifacted from what i’d expect of them.

changing antialiasing settings doesn’t seem to help. i also tried increasing the texture limits in preferences, no change. all are with pencil 1, min 0 max 54, black fully opaque, no soft tip (though that doesn’t really make a difference). this is a rendered image, 1280x720 project and output. even if i reduce the max size of the lines significantly, the result is still fuzzy and appears littered with digital noise.

mac pro, 10.7, 10gb ram, harmony 9.2.0, ati radeon 4870 512mb vram

http://i43.tinypic.com/21l51lk.png

have you tried looking at them in render view?

yeah, render view looks like this – keep in mind, what i posted is the rendered png, out of the render network.

no effects, just pencil lines using the texture aspect of the tool. its almost like the textures are just thumbnail previews that are being used as the actual, “tiled” pencil line textures.

They should look better…are these ickyline.png4?

I use png4 to create sequences and it’s very, very smooth and yet crystal clear.

Some of the texture are made to work on small lines and use small bitmap as texture with no anti-aliasing. That’s why some have a soft version also where there is some anti-aliasing done. The textures are small by design so that the drawings are not too heavy.

You can create your own texture and import them as styles. Just be aware that bringing a huge texture file will make your drawing very heavy and it will not help at the render if it’s way bigger than the output resolution. For example if your line is haft the size of camera frame and you are in HDTV that would mean that the line would have 1920/2 = 960 in the final render. Even if you create a pencil texture of 1500 pixels you will not get the quality of 1500 on that line but only 960.

You can see the size of the textures in C:\Program Files\Toon Boom Animation\Toon Boom Harmony 9.2\etc\penstyle_opacity_textures\ or the corresponding etc folder on Mac or linux. You will see that they vary from 10x40 to around 40x1000 pixels. You can use these as an example for your custom textures.

i am glad to know that this is normal, not a screen rendering issue for me.

thanks for pointing out the texture files, i had intentions to try making some and was going to dig for that location. the manual states that it is recommended to stay between 100x100 - 400x400, but i’ll probably test others. i see one that is 512px wide. it is helpful to see the files, to see at a glance the “native” or intended size of the stroke.