Synfig antialiasing appears non-functional

General Synfig general discussion
1

When I export a Synfig animation to PNG files using -a 1 or -a 4, the resulting PNG files are identical (as compared using “diff”).

It does appear to be antialiasing the PNGs no matter what, but how can I gain control over the antialiasing amount?

2

It wasn’t clear in the man page, but it seems that it is using -Q instead of -a.

-Q 0 is visibly different from -Q1, however -Q 4 produces the same PNG image as -Q 1. Why is there a quality scale if it’s only boolean?

Edit:

Upon further investigation, -Q 1 and -Q 9 are different.

A visual inspection shows that the -Q number is in reverse, with a lower number being higher quality, except for 0 which is the lowest quality.

Is this nonsense quality number a mistake or on purpose?

3

You can control to have no antialiasing on the individual shapes for Polygon, Region, Outline, Star and Advanced Outline. See the Antialias parameter on those layers.
-G

4

Quality changes behavior of some layers, not all of them. For example Motion Blur layer renders more subsamples based on quality values in intervals. See this:
github.com/synfig/synfig/blob/7 … r.cpp#L167

There is not enough documentation about quality effect for each layer. Time that someone starts to write it on the wiki.
-G

5

It was like that form the original developer:
0 = no quality (and on contrary horribly slow in many cases)
1-9 best to worse quality

Not a good choice, really.
-G

6

Apart of this antialiasing is only used by layers that doesn’t have a “accelerated render” function defined but just a “get color” for a certain point in user space.

When that happens, the antialiasing is effective and theoretically produces smoother render for higher antialiasing values. But render time is increased by a exponent of 2 based on antialiasing value.

See here which layers uses which method to render:
docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc … sp=sharing

-G

7

Seems that Motion Blur layer doesn’t follow that way ?

	switch(quality)
{
         case 1: // Production Quality
                  samples=32;
         break;
         case 2: // Excellent Quality
(....)
         default:
                  samples=1;

is’nt it ?

Nota : can’t access to the link “See here which layers uses which method to render:” docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc … sp=sharing

Nota bis : i done minor change in wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Render_dialog

8

It does.
Quality = 0 (default for the switch) means worse and 9 is better.
-G

9

Link is badly copied. Try the full one from the original post and do not literally copy the characters form the post but the link it follows when clicked:

NOTE: Curve Gradient is missing, it uses accelerated render.
-G

10

because a google account is needed …