Anti aliasing in shaded views.

Martin,

The answer to your question is no, but I am including an excellent explanation of the current state of anti-aliasing in MicroStation that Karin Smith provided in a similar thread on the forum earlier this year. The last paragraph addresses your specific question.

There are a variety of techniques for anti-aliasing, and I think it might help if I describe the options that are and are not available within MicroStation.

The View Options under MicroStation WorkSpace Preferences allow you to select anti-aliasing for lines and for text . They pertain to interactive display in MicroStation, and they take effect in the next update after they are changed.

The "Anti-alias Lines" selection applies to the display of line, arc, and curve primitives, as you would typically see in a wireframe view. When this selection is enabled, we blend the boundary pixels along lines, thus reducing the jagged stair-step effect and giving them a smoother appearance. Note that this applies to "wire" elements only - this technique cannot be used for display of edges in interactive hidden line or smooth shaded views.

The "Anti-alias Text" option applies to the display of small true-type glyphs, which we save in multi-resolution textures. The anti-aliasing effect is due to the filtering that occurs when the texels (texture pixels) are interpolated. This makes small text much more readable, especially in rotated or 3D views. (We use this same technique of interpolating between different resolutions of textures when displaying some types of raster elements and when displaying images on surfaces.)

Incidentally, selecting the auto-detect option for line or text anti-aliasing will enable anti-aliasing (as described above) in nearly all cases. The exceptions are some of the very old graphics hardware, where anti-aliasing was too just slow for interactive display.

These are the two types of anti-aliasing that can be done during interactive display in MicroStation. We provide options for these, because preferences vary greatly. Some people like the smoothness you get by anti-aliasing lines - others find them too blurry or are bothered by a halo that is sometimes visible around anti-aliased lines.

Beyond this, there are various options for doing full scene anti-aliasing, also known as super sampling. This is typically done by rendering a much larger image and downsampling the result. It is computationally expensive, since even a modest 2x full-scene anti-aliasing requires that 4 supersampled pixels must be drawn for each single pixel displayed on the screen. MicroStation does not do full scene anti-aliasing for interactive display (and never has), but we do provide options for this when using Luxology and when saving images. Most graphics hardware provides simple multisample anti-aliasing as well, and many graphics drivers provide options for enabling this type of anti-aliasing at the driver level. This is done completely outside of MicroStation - in fact, MicroStation is not even aware of it. Full scene anti-aliasing enabled in the driver has been useful in the past, when graphics rendering was much simpler. However, current (and recent) generations of hardware have evolved to become fully programmable graphics pipes, and applications like MicroStation are taking full advantage of this power. MicroStation is now using advanced interactive shader rendering techniques that are fundamentally incompatible with the simple hardware MSAA. We've chosen to use the hardware advancements to improve interactive performance and to improve advanced interactive rendering modes such as display of edges and transparency.

Hopefully this helps clarify the anti-aliasing options that MicroStation does and does not provide.

HTH,

Russell

Does this mean that I can achieve some kind of AA in shaded views? With "full scene anti-aliasing"? If that is the case, anyone could tell me how to activate that with a Nvidia Geforce GTX 460 / 465?

Well, I have been doing some test, especially with Blender and Sketchup where AA does work. And I have reached the conclusion that the advantage of AA, to make things look more "pretty" does not justify the sluggishness that it causes.

So I do think microstation is having the correct approach in this case. AA is in the end, not necessary for your workflow, especially when you loose alot of power having AA activated. I do not use AA anymore in sketchup and blender.

Well, I have been doing some test, especially with Blender and Sketchup where AA does work. And I have reached the conclusion that the advantage of AA, to make things look more "pretty" does not justify the sluggishness that it causes.

So I do think microstation is having the correct approach in this case. AA is in the end, not necessary for your workflow, especially when you loose alot of power having AA activated. I do not use AA anymore in sketchup and blender.