Eliminate Jagged Outlines in Decal Maps using Layersets

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Instructor Rick Barrett

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  • Duration: 02:56
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Use specific layers and remove premultiplied backgrounds with C4D's Layersets option.

You might notice a thin white line around the edges of decal maps, which appears because the artwork is premultiplied on a white background. Eliminating this jagged line is easy - just use Cinema 4D's Layersets option. With layered formats like PSD and TIFF you can choose which layers of the artwork should be used in the texture - and easily eliminate the premultiplied background. You'll also learn about SAT mapping, which is a great choice for getting crisp renders of detailed artwork.

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Transcript

In last week's Quick Tip, I showed how to use decal mapping to add labels and logos onto your product packaging renders. If you followed along and looked closely at your final result, you might have noticed a thin, white line surrounding your decal map, and this line is actually anti-aliasing. Even when we save the decal map on a transparent background, it's being pre-multiplied on a background color which is usually white, and when we put the decal on a different colored background, you can see just a thin amount of that white that's being caused by the anti-aliasing. This effect will be much more visible when you use a lower resolution decal map. As you increase the resolution of your decal map, it's less noticeable, to the point where, with this map, you might have trouble seeing it with the video compression. But if I turn on the AB mode, you might be able to see it a little bit clearer, with the white line appearing on the top and the fixed version on the bottom, and the good news is, is that this is actually pretty easy to fix, and that's going to be the subject of today's Quick Tip. So, what you need to do is go into the decal map material and on the color channel, you'll have your PSD, and this technique only works when you've saved your label in a layered format, like TIFF or PSD. Click on the big button that shows the filename, and that will go into a detail pane, and on the Shader tab, we want to go ahead and click the Select button next to the Layerset. This is one of the really cool functions of Cinema 4D which actually allows you to select individual layers from a layered image file that you want to use in each individual texture. So, you can actually eliminate whole pieces of your artwork this way, but what I want to do is simply select all of the layers and hit OK. Now it's just going to be using the layer content, and it's not actually going to evaluate the pre-multiplied background. Now, one other thing that's always a good idea to do when you're working with detailed artwork like this is to switch from the default MIP sampling into a SAT or Alias sampling. So, I'm going to go ahead and use SAT here, and you probably want to go into the Alpha channel and change to the SAT mapping here, as well, but you don't actually need to do any of the layer restrictions here unless you're actually eliminating pieces of the artwork. So now, when I render this out, you're going to see that we've eliminated that white line around the decal in order to get a perfectly clean image. If you enjoyed this Quick Tip, please like, share, and visit cineversity.com for more great Cinema 4D tutorials and resources.
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