Anti Aliasing

Introduction

Anti-aliasing remains somewhat of a mystery. When some of the objects for RCT were created, anti-aliasing was used to make the inner edges less pixelated. This sometimes had the added effect of creating a darker colored outline that can be found on many objects, most prominently found on objects from RCT1.

This dark outline helps to make objects stand out from the background, which can be great for shops, or statues. But less so for wall pieces, which would not be tileable with an outline.

Findings

One thing I would say is that I couldn't exclude the background colour from the renders in Lightwave, I found that rendering against black gave me too dark an edge to the images. Rendering against a green or magenta background gave horrible anti aliasing fringing problems. In the end I settled on red 57, green 59, blue 57 for my RGB values. The green 59 was there so that when I magic wanded away the background to transparent, I didn't also lift out any pure grey values of 57/57/57. Simon Foster - (YouTube)[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6Fci7NWYUo] All I can remember is that I used 3d Studio max for RCT 2. I used the primitive default scanline renderer with – I think – a Box(?) anti aliasing algorithm set very low, something like 1.4 pixels. I also made sure that the objects were set to not anti alias against the background so they had a crisp edge to them. Simon Foster - Email