Can we anti-alias? (pleeese say we can)

Someone mentioned the other day that they always turn anti-aliasing on when taking an inworld photo. I can't find it anywhere and have looked and looked, as those blocky edges in piccies look awful. Did I just dream it, or is there really a control somewhere to toggle it?

It's in Hardware Options in Graphics.

thanks osprey....running off to play with it ...

FYI: You can use anti-aliasing in any program on your computer, whether it's got anything built in for it or not. Simply go to your graphics card's control panel, and assign the program a profile. You can then apply a wide range of customized display settings for the program, including anti-aliasing.

I switched on anti-aliasing the other day in the graphics control panel and all avatars glowed brightly with white light so I turned it off again.

For photos, I save to disc and in photoshop I add 'gaussian blur' in filter options - that does the trick.

The easiest way to induce anti aliasing on any picture is to resize it by a few pixels. downsize is better. Many programs will automatically soften the edges.

That's odd. What graphics card are you using, and what driver? If it's nVidia, try the 175.19 driver release. That's the most SL-friendly release to date. If it's ATI, then the problem may be harder to solve. For inexplicable reasons, ATI consistently refuses to follow OpenGL standards.


There's a drawback with that. You blur the entire image, rather than just the edges of objects. It can work, but not as well as if the scene has been anti-aliased in the first place. There's no substitute for taking the photo with good settings to start with.


That does pretty much the same thing as applying a light amount of Gaussian blur (except the image stays the same size with the blur, of course). Again, it's always better (and easier) to take a well anti-aliased photo in the first place than to try to fake the AA later in post.

Chosen--I will try playing about in that gc control panel (this is something I had no idea about-you have taught me my new thing for the day), as the anti-alias in sl made me very chuggy and didnt seem to make much difference. (perhaps it only shows up in photos?)

Conifer and Kasuga- yay the blurring techniques too, as a little softness in the background can smooth out lots of fleckiness. Sometimes I blur the whole image, then softly erase to bring back sharpness where it's needed.

And, agree that it's betterer to work with a good image from the start

Look at straight lines, that's where it's most obvious. It really cleans up the jaggies.

You can get a little better quality on your snapshots by taking a high-res snapshot (under the Advanced menu, CTRL-ALT-D brings it up) and scaling it down by half.

If you have the hard drive space, try the high-res snapshot to disk option (in the Advanced menu: CTRL+ALT+D to open that up). You'll get snapshots that are huge (3000 or so pixels wide) and when you size them down you get nice smooth edges without having to do extra work just to smooth them in Photoshop (or your graphics program of choice).

Edit: I should so learn to read to the very last post of a thread before jumping in *g* Milla beat me to it (by a good couple of hours!)

i know there is something in the advanced settings also that you can play with..

EDIT: BLEH..i really need to start reading the post above mine before i post..Eh sware!!!
i am getting terrible at forgetting to do that

4xAntiailiasing + Hi Rez Snapshot To Disk = Epic eye candy. =^-^=

I found I could run those settings right around the time Bay City opened. It changed my whole outlook on the graphical quality of SL. (^_^)y

DOH! I know I've looked at the Hardware Options panel in the past and somehow missed the anti-aliasing setting all this time. I've just been taking pics large and scaling them in PS. I don't know if I'm imagining it (had to do a glucose test today and pumped full of sugar ), but it seemed to reduce the alpha flicker on a skirt I'd been fighting with a bit too.

By the way, if you are on a Mac using OS X, you have no direct control over graphics card settings besides calibration under display preferences... and I don't remember there being an anti-aliasing option in there. You can download a program to do it, but the whole "you could possibly fry your video card if you make a mistake" warning scared me off trying it.

Ok--i am now going to do ALL these things (hi res, anti-alias x4, save to disc as a biggie, resize to soften) Lets see what it can do

Thankyou all for helpful advice.....i knew you smarties over here would sort me out