Need Help on Lightworks AA

[Anonymous]

I am completly discovering from scratch Lw. This render is the third. For now i don't care about lightning or finishes because i cannot get a nice antialiased rendering. I tryed almost (i think) every setting available for Lw in ArchiCAD. I need an advice please...

[Dwight]

1: exactly what is the antialiasing setting?

2: perhaps your rendering just needs more pixels to resolve that tiny muntin?

[Anonymous]

Flav wrote:
I am completly discovering from scratch Lw. This render is the third. For now i don't care about lightning or finishes because i cannot get a nice antialiased rendering. I tryed almost (i think) every setting available for Lw in ArchiCAD. I need an advice please...

I too have found the LW Rendering Engine to have very, very poor antialiasing quality. It is just about the worst I have seem on any modern rendering engine. Images look somewhat muddy and blurry especially at thin lines like railings and window mullions and at textures. What I have found to be strange is that LW antialiasing quality on better setting actually provides superior antialiasing quality at railings, window mullions and textures than LW AA best setting (but best is superior with shadow edges).

When you take the same scene and render it using LW vs. Internal Rendering Engine (IRE) on the best antialiasing settings the quality of the AA is far superior in the IRE. And that's without using the IRE option for texture AA which increases texture AA quality significantly. Antialiasing quality is so poor on the Lightworks engine at best setting I think that there has to be a bug somewhere. I wonder it Graphisoft is looking into this. It would be nice to have this addressed since the LW Rendering engine is about 10 times faster on my computer and has more rendering capabilities.

[Anonymous]

In my opinion LW is not simple, just simply to use.
I must learn, how LW works.
LW is very powerful rendering engine (if somebody knows, how it works.).
I personally learned very much through Dwight.
It is very good chance and luck to have Dwight here in this forum (Graphisoft or LW gives just funny tips.)
Before criticizing it would be better to solve and to develope skill with LW.

[Anonymous]

samsung wrote:
In my opinion LW is not simple, just simply to use.
I must learn, how LW works.
LW is very powerful rendering engine (if somebody knows, how it works.).
I personally learned very much through Dwight.
It is very good chance and luck to have Dwight here in this forum (Graphisoft or LW gives just funny tips.)
Before criticizing it would be better to solve and to develope skill with LW.

Samsung, you shouldn't criticize my skill and tell me to develop more because you have no idea of what my skill level is. I will say this I have been working with 3D modeling and rendering software for over fifteen years. You must keep in mind I am only talking about antialiasing quality not rendering quality, there is a big difference. Do you even know what Antialiasing is? If you did you would know that antialiasing has very, very little to do with the users technique it either works well or does not.

There are however many techniques that can be done to mitigate poor antialiasing engines. But, you must realize that antialiasing is a destructive post image process and once it is done poorly the level of detail in the image cannot be restored and when using these techniques you aren't really using the antialiasing engine to make the perceived antialiasing quality improve. That is why so many workarounds for poor antialiasing quality involve using higher resolutions which mean significantly higher rendering times. I have run tests and you can get better antialiasing quality with the ArchiCAD's Internal Rendering Engine than using the Lightworks Engine at TWICE the resolution and scaling the image down to same size. This is a problem.

My point is that when I use Form•Z, Art•lantis, Maya, ArchiCAD Internal Rendering Engine, etc., I don't have to worry about antialiasing quality; now using the Lightworks engine I do. Even Bryce which costs $80.00 has better antialiasing quality. This combined with the superior AA performance of the ArchiCAD IRE is why I think it could be a bug. Most antialiasing engines are based on sampling pixels, comparing that sample to the adjacent pixels, and executing an action when threshold conditions between sampled pixels are meet. It is a very simple overall principle. Let's say one of the thresholds was off from the intended value (typo or whatever in the code); it would cause antialiasing quality to suffer because action would be taken when it is not supposed to or vice versa. The farther the value was off from the intended value the more severe the change in quality would be (i.e. muddier images or more jagged images) but the antialiasing engine would still function just not well. This would sure explain why many parts of an image rendered with LW better AA look superior to LW best AA. It is just a theory but I hope the theory is correct because if it is it would be relatively easy and painless to fix. Otherwise we have to suffer and workaround this issue for a while, a waste of time in my opinion. The antialiasing shortcomings of the LW engine are undeniable even to the untrained eye and I haven't had to perform workarounds for poor antialiasing quality for quite some time until using LW engine in ArchiCAD and you know what I shouldn't have to.

[Anonymous]

LW compared to Artlaantis makes rendering more clear look.

[Dwight]

Did some research on this [got a message from LightWorks]:

In the implementation of the LightWorks Engine, Graphisoft elected to maintain the legacy antialiasing description that is not totally appropriate to the LightWorks antialiasing strategy.

This is like the Certs candy ad where the appealing twins argue that its a cough drop or a nasal decongestant. It's both!

It turns out that the "Better" anti-aliasing is best [as colleague Michael Scott said] for fine muntins, etc, while "Best" is best when antialiased shadows are needed.

Michael: do you have any comment about shadow qualities when using "Better" antialiasing?

Yet another ambiguous situation - does one go for defining element edges or fine surfaces?

The only solution I can determine is that for both fine edges and smooth shadows, you need to render twice your final size and reduce it in Photoshop with bicubic sharper setting. Not realistic.

And so it goes.

[Anonymous]

Anybody have an update on this issue?

Seeing as this is a confirmed bug it seems like something Graphisoft should put a priority on fixing considering the Lightworks engine was one of the signature features of this release and this is a pretty major shortcoming for a rendering engine. Basically everyone who uses the Lightworks engine will get mediocre antialiasing and have to work around the issue until it is fixed. Such a shame that time saved by the Lightworks engine's speed is offset by having to workaround antialiasing short comings. Also, this really should be fixed in a maintenance update rather than release 10 as it is a bug.

I also note an additional major problem with the Lightworks Engine. When using antialiasing on the best setting the image seems to have the same light balance and saturation as when rendering with antialiasing off (as it should be). But when you render with good or best setting the image seems to have a different light balance and saturation from the best and none renderings. This is especially noticeable when looking through windows. In the best and none setting it is rather dark inside but with good and better setting it is really light. Where is the additional light or improper shading of light coming from? Antialiasing should never effect the light quality of the image. This is a another major problem with the engine.

The antialiasing problems in the Lightworks Engine seem to run deep. Graphisoft or Lightworks please fix these issues. Other rendering programs I have used that use the Lightworks engine don't have these problems.

I have attached a reference image as an example of the problems. Stated quality refers to antialias quality. No other changes were made and no post image processing other than converting to jpeg.

1. Notice how blurry the railings and store front system looks in the Lightworks - Best. Also note how the railings and store front are actually sharper in the good and better than in the best.
2. Notice the "jaggies" on the shadows on through the first floor store front system in the Lightworks - Good and Better (They are basically not antialiased at all). Also note how intersection between walls and floors are jagged and not antialiased in LWE - Good and Better.
3. Notice the unexplained shift in light values, from the LWE None and Best to the LWE Good and Better. Huh?
Note: I included the ArchiCAD Internal Rendering Engine as a reference for antialias quality only. Obviously the light, rendering, and output capabilities of this engine are inferior. But look how clean, railings, mullions, shadows, and wall / floor intersections are.

[Anonymous]

My two cents..
I completly agree with you Michael. Actually I advised in some post before to avoid 'best' AA in interiors and strong close-ups because most of the fine texture details are flattened.

So, the simple solution should be not to use it, right? Wrong. Try to make scene with mirror and strong light and render it with 'better' AA. Everything in the reflection look crispy and grainy - especially shaders which use displacement factor (bump). That, I think, is another bug.

This issue as well as some other regarding light and texture control shows that LW in AC is more like experiment than fully functional feature at this stage, however having real fast and accurate rendering engine 'inside' the AC is something I dreamed since version 6.0.