[Luke Harris]

Hey mate,

Just figured this one out. Sometimes the Vectors pass doesn’t render with a correct alpha – check that AE is recognising the alpha, if it isn’t, it’ll just appear as a black background, which stuffs up RSMB.

Solution:
Put an Extract effect on the vectors that are precomped – set the black point to 1, making all pure blacks transparent.

Should all work now!

Luke

[Luke Harris]

It does not “Magically turn it into a vector”

– When you scale up that small .ai file, it merely *treats* it like a vector file, i.e. does not try to anti-alias it. This is not a treatment which suddenly creates resolution where there is none, this is a treatment which when you scale up a bitmap will give you large, sharp squares for each bit as opposed to those terrible AE anti-aliased blurs.

This treatment carries on through to the render stage at full quality renders, very useful for making 8-bit animated characters, even in 2.5D with lights affecting the layers.

Just give it a go, my money has already been put on the table and I don’t bluff.

Luke

[Luke Harris]

Hey mate,

I’ve discovered an easy way to get bitmaps etc to not anti-alias, while still giving you the ability to render at best quality.

Open up Illustrator, drop a bitmap into it, save it as an Adobe Illustrator file.

Put that Adobe Illustrator file into an After Effects, enable continuous rasterising, and even though it’s a bitmap, AE treats it like a vector!!

Hope that works as well for you as it did for me… Now I can get that awesome retro bitmap look and combine it with some lighting and 2.5D 🙂

Luke Harris
Motion Graphics Design
Sydney, Australia
https://www.lukeharris.biz