Any way to export as image without anti-aliasing?

[line-weight]

I'd like to export from VW to an image file (TIFF or JPG) but without anti-aliased edges. Is it possible? I can't seem to find any control for it in the export options.

[grant_PD]

you can set anti aliasing off in the render options of however you are rendering it.  

[line-weight]

16 minutes ago, grant_PD said:

you can set anti aliasing off in the render options of however you are rendering it.  

 

It's just 2d geometry (solid colour filled polygons) that I'm trying to export from a design layer.

 

Have tried making a viewport of it on a sheet layer. Rendering is wireframe, but can't see an option to turn off anti-aliasing.

[grant_PD]

I just did a quick test, you can display it in OpenGL as the rendering option and have anti aliasing off.  

[line-weight]

Hm, tried doing it rendered in OpenGL and unchecked the anti-aliasing box...export as TIFF... but am getting this

 

 

Edited May 2, 2018 by line-weight

[grant_PD]

isn't that what you want?  You are trying to export something without anti-aliasing.  That sure looks jaggedy to me!😀

[PVA - Admin]

9 minutes ago, line-weight said:

Hm, tried doing it rendered in OpenGL and unchecked the anti-aliasing box...export as TIFF... but am getting this

 

This looks like you need to raise the DPI during export, Anti Aliasing is a setting that reduces pixellation for renderings mainly. The edges you are seeing there are heavily aliased but most likely as a result of the export settings. TIFF is fine but make sure to increase the DPI on the left of the Export Image dialog. 

Usually 300DPI is more than enough but if youll be zooming in on the edges when presenting you may want to go higher.

[line-weight]

I need the image to have just the three colours in it - dark blue, green, light blue. There should be no pixels which aren't one of those three colours. The image I posted above you can see that there are pixels along the edge that have taken on an intermediate colour - ie ant-aliasing has been applied.

 

In this case, it's so that I can give it to someone to work on in photoshop. They need to be able to replace any of those three colours. That's something easily done with the paintbucket tool unless you've got those intermediate colours on the edges. It would be very difficult to neatly swap the green for a red, say, with that image.

 

Increasing the DPI doesn't solve this issue.

 

You might say that I should be exporting in a vector format so that they have the exact geometry to work on in, say, illustrator. I'll not go into the full reasons why that isn't an option in this case, but it's not.

[PVA - Admin]

Ahh then in that case you likely wont be able to do this in Vectorworks. All raster image formats allow for color variance at edges as part of their compression, sime formats let you limit this color range but Vectorworks doesn't have controls for that other than Full Color, Greyscale and Black and White in the image export dialog.

Likely you would need to export from Vectorworks, then bring it into a photo editing application and reduce the color range for the image from millions (where it probably is now) to 256, 64, etc to get the clean cut edges you're looking for.

[grant_PD]

in photoshop you can save for web and specify the color table, down to your 3 colors.  

[line-weight]

For sure the number of colours can be reduced down in photoshop - it's getting it there intact in the first place that is the issue. Giving photoshop an image that's got interpolated colours, then reducing the number of colours to force it to put each of those interpolated pixels into one of those colours would work to some extent but I don't think it would produce tidy edges.

 

I wonder if exporting each colour 'layer' as a black and white raster image would work. Then they have to reassemble at the other end.

 

I appreciate that this kind of thing isn't really what VW is intended for.

[Andy Broomell]

Just spitballing an idea with no testing whatsoever... What about exporting a DWG, opening this in Illustrator, then either saving an image from Illustrator or just opening the Illustrator file in Photoshop which will rasterize in the process? Not sure if that allows for not anti-aliasing somewhere in the process...

[AlanW]

Hi maybe this has been checked but what is your sheet layer dpi, looks like it it set to default 72dpi. Kick it up to say 300 and try from a viewport.

[line-weight]

DPI is irrelevant to whether it's antialiased or not.

On 5/3/2018 at 1:39 AM, Andy Broomell said:

Just spitballing an idea with no testing whatsoever... What about exporting a DWG, opening this in Illustrator, then either saving an image from Illustrator or just opening the Illustrator file in Photoshop which will rasterize in the process? Not sure if that allows for not anti-aliasing somewhere in the process...

 

Yes, this might well work.