Is my font supposed to be this blurry?

[John Cuevas]

Jerry, when you use the zoom to get a closer view, AE shows you exactly what you would see if you zoomed into a finished rendered file, and that’s interpreted scaled up pixels. It will not look perfect. It’s just like if you scale up a bit map photo. If you have created your text correctly, it will render perfectly and will be sharp.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[Jerry Smith]

Hey John,
Thanks so much for the help. I’m really at wits end here and may need to find and hire an expert to tell me what is going on. I have two different problems. One is in the other thread about rotations and translations. The other is this one with text. It is very simple. I create some 70 pt text. I switch on the 3d box. And then my vector text needs two rows of pixels to transition from black to white. It doesn’t make any sense. You don’t even need a background to see it (although it is easier on the eyes than the checkerboard). You just create some text and click on 3d. You will see it immediately softens as you see in my image above. I have no idea why. I’m not sure I follow your last reply. Because I did create the text perfectly. I created in the minimum number of steps. Do you agree that 3d makes text softer?

[Joel Bellagamba]

Hi,

I am having the exact same issue and I feel upset about that.
I know it’s been quite a long time but did you find any solution about it Jerry ?

If you have created your text correctly, it will render perfectly and will be sharp.

I did the test on a Quicktime Animation rendered file and I’m sorry to say no it is not sharp. Of course, it is not that obvious, but I want my vector layers to be as sharp as they are in 2D.

(I might have a workaround about this when dealing with AI file. I just copy and paste my path from Illutrator to After Effects on a shape layer. I did this with text, turned the layer and 3D and hopefully there was no change on the edges, but it’s time consuming and boring…)

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

A simple handling is to add a curves adjustment and pull in the highlight and shadow ends of the alpha channel about 15%.

[Matt Didd]

Hi Kalle

May I ask whereabouts in After effects would I be able to ‘pull in the highlight and shadow ends of the alpha channel’ as mentioned in your post.

I tried using the option: Effect > Color Correction > Shadow/Highlight but it didn’t appear to work.

Any help would be much appreciated as I also have 3D text that is blurry.

Many thanks

Matt

[Michael Szalapski]

Read the post a bit more carefully, they suggest using the Curves effect and working on the alpha channel there. Note how you can work on the overall RGB, but you can also choose to work specifically on R, B, B, or A.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Ryan Sears]

I know this is years old. But Ive been using 3D text for years and never had this issue before. But I want to post my solve in case anyone is running into this problem because it was driving me nuts.
Ran into the same problem, had 2D text, everything was scaled correctly and at highest resolution possible. I click it to become 3D layer and it would get soft.
So the problem was the position of the layer was not on a full pixel integer. It was on a number like 665.5 I changed it to 665, and it became crisp again as it should be.

[Robert Headrick]

THANK YOU. I was just in that same boat today. Never really noticed an issue before (maybe it’s happened, but if it has it’s not been noticeable enough for me to dig around for a solution), but it showed up big time today, with noticeable and unacceptable soft text in just one portion of a larger animation. Dug through comps and precomps, triple-checked that “continuously rasterize” was turned on where applicable, looked for stray effects etc and found NO reason why the text shouldn’t be perfectly crisp. So I started down the Google rabbithole, and it led me here, and this was exactly the fix I needed.

So to reiterate: if your 3D text is not showing up crisp, check the position values and round up or down to full integers.