Rendering Quality
From Ultrafractal Wiki
also see: Anti-aliasing
"changed it to depth 1, and threshold 0.2.. it goes much quicker... will the quality be less? juliette "
Juliette,
Yes, the quality will be "less". With the anti-aliasing set to depth 1 and subdivisions at 3x3, for every pixel in the final image there are a maximum of 9 pixels actually computed and blended. If you increase the depth to 3, for every pixel in the final image you have a maximum of 729 pixels computed and blended. 729 is much greater than 9 so that is why there is such a difference in speed.
The theory suggests that the more pixels you compute (your "samples") then the more effective your anti-aliasing will be. In ten years I've never had to use a depth higher than 2, and most of the time a depth of 1 is completely sufficient. The times you need a depth of 2 is when you have very fine detail that forms an important part of the image.
So even though depth 1 or 2 has "less" quality than depth 3, on most images if you put the results side-by-side you probably could not guess which was which.
Damien
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Hi Juliette,
Was the quality down? Was the box "Force linear drawing method" checked? That has to be, because on page 73 of the manual it is said:
"To make sure the fine dots and filaments are rendered correctly, enable the Force Linear drawing method option. This forces Ultra Fractal to use the One-pass Linear drawing method on all layers which produces more accurate results than the default Guessing drawing method. You can accept all the other default settings in the Render to Disk tool window so click OK to start the render."
The default settings for custom anti-aliasing are: Threshold: 0.1 Depth: 1 Subvisions: 9(3x3)
Imported images slow down the process in my opinion. The smaller the better I would say and PNG format. (Might not work as the image is used as background. Never tried that).
Kind regards, Gerda
I render mine at 300 ppi and then do a little sharpening in the post-processor (usually duplicate the layer, do an Unsharp mask on the duplicate layer, and then adjust the opacity of the duplicate layer)
Jim Blue
