3DS Max Opening Crawl

I've been experimenting with quite a selection of different opening crawls recently for my latest fanfilm, and I must say the best I have found so far is the one that Dr. Harry Chang and Chris Borges-Silva generously posted on Sci-Fi 3D. We plan on releasing the film on DVD once it's finished, though, so for obvious reasons we're having to render it pretty huge (4096x1743, letterbox).

With this particular crawl, however, I've found that the text seems to pixelate pretty noticably at this sort of resolution when rendered in 3DS Max. The size of the targa file seems plenty big enough, I purposely created one with 5000x10000 pixel dimensions to accomodate for the high-res and when the TGA is viewed on its own it's as smooth as a baby's behind Any ideas..?

 

Try checking our your anti-aliasing settings or your super-sampling settings in the render settings.

 

Use spline text in Max instead of a bitmap. Add a little bit of motion blur and you can get something very close to the originals.

 

You know there's really no reason to render at ridiculous sizes if you're just producing for a DVD, the DVD size is only 720x480, rendering much larger than that really doesn't do anything.

And yeah, check your anti-aliasing setings, you can also us supersampling to increase anti-alias.

 

Thanks, I'll give it a go. @DarthViper: 4096x1743 is kind of excessive, yes, but then what sort of resolution would you recommend that could play at DVD quality on most widescreen televesions? From the research I'd done I'd found that to be about the norm for DVD releases, but then this is my first fanfilm so I don't have too much experience in that sort of thing... Thanks again for your help.

 

It doesn't matter if it's being played on a widescreen TV or not, no matter what the DVD resolution is at a max of 720x480, there are HD and Blue-Ray discs, but you can't burn on those yet and the resolution of those isn't even close to what you've got. Just anything with a max width of 720 would be fine.

 

Oh right, well, um... thanks... It works great with supersampling on, by the way, though it is a little blurry. I'll just have a bit of a play around with the settings and see what I can do, but at any rate it's a huge improvement. Could anyone perhaps recommend the supersampling settings that they might use?

 

a resolution of 1920x1080 (which is HD) would work great, it gives you room to play with. Either way though you HAVE to scale down everything to 720x480 so I would just render out to that, unless you are planning on doing anything HD related or projecting in HD.