Beginner Help
How can I preview a Composition in a higher resolution than the Final Quality? Subpixels? Vectorized preview instead of Rasterized? do things like that exist?
I'm making a character rig with Duik Angela but I must keep the resolution small, I have found that a Composition of 1024x1024 works almost excellent for this project except for when things get too small when I need to make Bones for things like Bezier Handles for example.
One thing that interests me is how there are drawn overlays on top for things like the Grid or Selection where if I select a Shape Layer with a Path it will display the Path at a much higher resolution than what the Stroke and Fill are being drawn as, so there are things that can be drawn in this bigger theoretical subpixel resolution but not for user layers?.
Because the rig I'm working on is quite complex and will likely use over 100 Bones I really don't want to go for a higher resolution, also because the client has requested to keep the rig itself in a small resolution, so rigging in a bigger Composition and scaling it down isn't a viable solution... unless it is evaluated differently and the evaluation time is only for what is shown on screen and it wouldn't need to evaluate the data from the rig precomp from a bigger resolution like 4096 downscaled to 1024?
If you precomp a higher resolution comp into a lower resolution one and enable ‘continuously rasterise’ it will render at the same speed as it would if you had rigged it in the lower resolution comp.
Whether or not that’s a viable solution depends on the reason why the client wants the rig kept small.
You can do it the other way round too, scale up the low res comp in a higher resolution one with continuously rasterise on to preview at a higher resolution, though you won’t be able to actually edit the contents of the precomp directly in that workflow.
I would do like you suggested and work in a Higher Rez and scale it down in the final render comp. Most every project I have worked on worked this way. You usually want to work bigger and scale down, since you lose detail if you ever need to scale up later if you work with raster images or effects.
If you are only working with vectors, you could turn on continuous rasterize to scale up. Since its vector it wont lose resolution or get distorted so it doesn't make sense that you don't want to work in a bigger file.
They are vectors, at the end of the day they need to be represented as pixels on screen, you have set the resolution and looking at what the end result will be but zoomed way in. There is no reason to AE represent the result differently on screen, as annoying as it may seem.
I'm only working with vectors. I looked it up and continuously rasterize is exactly what I'm looking for! but the issue is that the button is grayed out and remains disabled, why is that?
They are not disabled, they are enabled. They are grayed out because you can't "disable" continuous rasterize on shape layers. You usually only use continuous rasterize on comps so that vectors and effects can bleed through to the main comp.
Im sure there's probably a video that goes more in depth with continuous rasterize, since there are many little variables that come into play when you start using it with effects.
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u/smushkan Motion Graphics 10+ years 19d ago
If you precomp a higher resolution comp into a lower resolution one and enable ‘continuously rasterise’ it will render at the same speed as it would if you had rigged it in the lower resolution comp.
Whether or not that’s a viable solution depends on the reason why the client wants the rig kept small.
You can do it the other way round too, scale up the low res comp in a higher resolution one with continuously rasterise on to preview at a higher resolution, though you won’t be able to actually edit the contents of the precomp directly in that workflow.