Decals

[Maka]

Help !

I applied a decal to the ground from a Jpeg file in the choreography window. The image was quite clear during the first portion of the animation work and then changed to a highly and largely pixelated version, making it unreadable. It rendered fine, but I need the clarity to coordinate the animation. I tried deleting the decal and reapplying, closing the program and restarting the computer, none of which helped. Can anyone tell me how to clear up the decal ?

Thanks

[HomeSlice]

Don't know for sure but I have a couple of ideas.

1) Open up the image in a paint program and make it twice as large.

2) Use a TGA image instead of JPEG

[petokosun]

Why should one use TGA instead of JPEG.

[Rodney]

Why should one use TGA instead of JPEG.

 

JPEG is a lossy image format.

What that means is that the image can degrade over time as the image is saved or (especially) converted. Once the image data is lost it cannot be regained.

 

Targa is lossless in that the image format retains enough information to recreate the same image data even through conversion.

 

There are other reasons TGA works better in many cases.

TGA stores Red, Green Blue and Alpha Channels. The Alpha Channel specifies the transparency of every pixel in the image (255 shades of grey for 255 levels of transparency)

JPEG has no transparency.

 

There are reasons to use JPEG over TGA.

JPG images easily display on webpages.

TGA images have to have a plugin or extension installed to be viewed on a webpage.

(But once you have a TGA image you can easily convert a copy to JPG or other format too)

 

JPG can be set with very good compression sizes to maximize quality yet maintain smaller file size.

 

If you desire a mid ground somewhere between the two image formats investigate PNG.

Its a newer image format that can be displayed on webpages, has transparency and can be compressed considerably as well.

 

 

Here is a useful writeup on the JPG format I found at www.faq.org:

Note the part about errors I've highlighted below. Targa format is less likely to experience these errors.

 

JPEG is "lossy," meaning that the decompressed image isn't quite the same as

the one you started with. (There are lossless image compression algorithms,

but JPEG achieves much greater compression than is possible with lossless

methods.) JPEG is designed to exploit known limitations of the human eye,

notably the fact that small color changes are perceived less accurately than

small changes in brightness. Thus, JPEG is intended for compressing images

that will be looked at by humans. If you plan to machine-analyze your

images, the small errors introduced by JPEG may be a problem for you, even

if they are invisible to the eye.

A useful property of JPEG is that the degree of lossiness can be varied by

adjusting compression parameters. This means that the image maker can trade

off file size against output image quality. You can make *extremely* small

files if you don't mind poor quality; this is useful for applications such

as indexing image archives. Conversely, if you aren't happy with the output

quality at the default compression setting, you can jack up the quality

until you are satisfied, and accept lesser compression.

 

Another important aspect of JPEG is that decoders can trade off decoding

speed against image quality, by using fast but inaccurate approximations to

the required calculations. Some viewers obtain remarkable speedups in this

way. (Encoders can also trade accuracy for speed, but there's usually less

reason to make such a sacrifice when writing a file.)

[Maka]

Thanks so much for that great information ! I'll let you know how it works.