Pixelated even in Full Resolution

[julianbacani]

Hi!

I will indicate as much detail as I can.

I created a digital painting in Photoshop with high resolution (400 dpi). I then created a new comp (1920x1080) in AE and used the drawing as a texture for spherical map in Element 3d. The reason I want to do this is I want to orbit around my drawing (just like what you can do with Google Street View). I successfully laid the drawing in E3D and it all perfectly fits, I also animated a camera.

But then I noticed that the comp window is showing a pixelated video. The RAM preview is in FULL resolution, I tried switching from Quarter to Full but seems the Quarter Resolution makes the image clearer. But I know it's not. I checked the Preview panel and changed the resolution from Auto to Final...still no changes. I toggle between Adaptive Resolution and Off (Final Quality) but still the video preview is pixelated. I also checked the Preference > Preview but everything is in default value.

I tried adding the drawing as a normal layer and it is sharp. But the drawing as a map in E3D is pixelated.

What do you think the problem and the solution is? Below is the video of my problem in AE.

https://streamable.com/hv6u5

Thanks!

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

As soon as you said 400 dpi I had a good idea what is wrong. You cannot assign a dpi value to an image that is made up of pixels and PPI only means something if you are sending an image to a printer. There are no inches in video and there are no inches on a web page. Only pixels.

It looks like you have scaled up the image to about an effective 400%. This tells me your texture map does not have enough pixels. Just for fun open these in Photoshop and check the PPI. They are both exactly the same number of pixels high and wide.

Drop them in Illustrator (primarily a print application) or even MS Word and the 1 PPI image will more than fill a page and you'll be lucky to find the 9999 ppi image because it will be so small.

Your digital painting needs to be at least 3.141 times as wide as the diameter of your sphere when the distance between the camera and the surface of the sphere is equal to the zoom value of the camera. I never did see the entire sphere in your comp so I am going to assume that it is twice the size of your 1920 wide comp. If that is the case then your image needs to be about 12000 pixels wide. That is how many pixels you need to wrap a sphere that is about twice as wide as an HD comp. You calculate that value by taking the diameter of the sphere when it is the same distance from the camera as the zoom value of the camera.

If you intend to move even closer to the sphere then you need even more pixels. It would not be uncommon to need an image that was approximately 24,000 by 8000 pixels to wrap a sphere you wanted to move around on in an HD comp.

We could tell for sure that this is the problem if we could see the modified properties of the layer giving you problems (uu will reveal them) and we knew the size of your digital artwork. You could just print screen and paste to the forum.

I hope this helps you understand how to prepare images for video production.

[julianbacani]

WOW! You got it, sir. Thanks for the detailed help. Will keep that in mind.