Images look terrible in adobe animate

[chriss97299627]

Before you respond, yes, I am disabling smoothing on image files.

I have been comparing the image quality between bitmaps and images in adobe animate. I've noticed that while bitmaps look smooth, image files look just terrible when the VCam moves, with some weird graphics when the camera moves and calculates how the images should look. Can someone explain to me how to use images and no not have a loss in quality? I use massive bitmap files in my work for parallax backgrounds, but they are very resource intensive and I want them to be images instead.

[JoãoCésar]

Hi.

Can you provide some examples? And is this VCam that you mentioned a custom AS3 approach or the default Camera tool from Animate?

Regards,

JC

[chriss97299627]

The vcam is a custom AS3 approach many animators that I know of use. I don't like using the camera tool since it's not user friendly.

[JoãoCésar]

Got it.

What I can say is that if you have a bitmap that is set to be 320 x 320 pixels and the camera is at a 2x zoom, than the original size of your bitmap should be 640 x 640 pixels.

To sum up: you should have all your bitmaps scaled down.

[chriss97299627]

I animate in pixel art so my camera size is usually pretty small. A typical scene will normally be around 200 pixels wide. That being said, if I try to use images instead of bitmaps when animating, the images have this weird look to them whenever I move the camera. It looks terrible! Do I just stick to using bitmaps all the time, which is very expensive or is there some magic formula to using images?

[JoãoCésar]

Can you provide some screenshots and/or video of what you're doing?

[chriss97299627]

I have attached a video with the terrain as in IMAGE, and another with the terrain is a BITMAP.

I also tried the comparison with adobe animate camera and there was no difference. You can see when the camera finishes moving with the image file, the terrian near the BOTTOM kinda freezes for a second there and then locks into place. Hard to explain but it looks bad. With the bitmap video, you can see it's much more smooth and doesn't have that weird effect when the camera stops moving.

The video using an image for terrian just looks terrible.

Are images just useless then if it reduces the video quality? Or am I missing something?

[JoãoCésar]

Thanks.

I can really tell the difference by looking at the videos.

What exactly do you call an image?

Do you mind uploading an FLA and sharing the link here?

[chriss97299627]

Here is a test project that compares the image and the bitmap side by side.

[chriss97299627]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16ByaW675lNbDRpdzKlNo2ZpY2izBeDDd/view?usp=share_link

[JoãoCésar]

Thank you for the files.

The top instance, which uses vector shapes (this term is more correct than "images") is way too complex. It has lots of tiles and each tile has lots of vector shapes. This is a nightmare for any runtime.

You should use only bitmaps at runtime if you want to work with pixel art.

One more thing worth trying is to use rectangular shapes and apply bitmap fills. This may prevent jerky movements.

But if you really want to keep the vector shapes, at least consider caching the parent as bitmap.

Regards,

JC

[chriss97299627]

How do I cache the parent as a bitmap? This is new to me.

On a side note, I actually am working with pixel art.

[rayek.elfin]

The bitmap version also suffers from some display errors, however: thin seams between textures are visible.when the camera starts moving due to imprecise rounding.

(It happens to be a known issue in 2d game development.)

[chriss97299627]

Is there a way to minimize this or some best practices i can follow?

[rayek.elfin]

If you'd asked me that about Godot or other game engines I could've provided you with answers and possible solutions/workarounds. Game engines have built-in tricks to prevent those rendering errors and it is possible to use custom shaders to fix those as well as those awful jumpy looking pixels at the start and end of both movies (courtesy of sub-pixel movement by the camera).

With Animate CC? Don't have a clue to be honest 😉

I would never think of animating pixel art in Flash/Animate (Although I am aware quite a few young ones have and do).

The people at Newgrounds might have clue to minimize those artefacts. Quite a few pixel art Flash animators over there.

[chriss97299627]

thanks for the advice, i appreciate it.

[Nick Gioia]

Check your setting for images in publisher settings. 

[chriss97299627]

Sorry,  I know about JPEG Quality.