Jaggies on Clock Hands
Help!!!
Thursday, February 2, 2012 by RedneckDude | Discussion: Skinning
Anyone have any ideas on how to stop clock hands from being jaggy as they rotate on a DesktopX analog clock?
Reply #2 Thursday, February 2, 2012 9:54 PM
I am using png files. Still getting jaggies. Tried adding blur, helped a little, not much. Thanks JC.
Reply #3 Thursday, February 2, 2012 10:02 PM
hmmmmmmmm, you adding blur to the hand itself and are you using shadows? Just curious.
Reply #4 Thursday, February 2, 2012 10:05 PM
Blur to the graphic. No shadowing. Tried shadowing to...no good.
Reply #5 Thursday, February 2, 2012 10:07 PM
If you're talking about straight line clock hands, I once used some glow of the same color of the clock hands to create a faux antialias/smoother edges. For a white clock, I had used a white glow, settings: Sharp=5 Darkness=1000 OffsetX=0 OffsetY=0.
eta: That's the built-in DX glow, not part of the image.
Reply #6 Thursday, February 2, 2012 11:28 PM
A little better, but it didn't completely do it.
Made the hand twice as thick too. I guess I could make it smaller, then add glow.
Reply #7 Friday, February 3, 2012 4:24 AM
Anti/alias is supposed to cure that but from what I've seen, in smx anyway, is that when the hands move the image changes. In a straight line the pixels line up nicely but at angles greater or lesser than 45 degrees the pixels form a sort of irregular stair step which creates the jaggies. I never use the hands from smx, always create a .png for them. Works fine if the image is say 3 to 4 pixels wide but the second hand, 1 to 2 pixels wide always has jaggies as it moves. I've tried shadows but the shadow moves with the hand and doesn't maintain the proper lighting angle. I don't know of any work around for it.
Reply #8 Friday, February 3, 2012 5:14 AM
I can't really tell if it's much of an improvement, but the current clock hand images being used are vertical or horizontal, and then DesktopX rotates them. What if you start with a diagonal image to begin with? It still has 'jaggies', but they look a bit different.
Combined with the 'shadow' feature it seems to look better still, but again, maybe isn't really that huge an improvement.
Reply #9 Friday, February 3, 2012 5:16 AM
Or you could use a set of aliased hand images at various angles and swap them in depending on the angle of the hand. You might get away with using about 8 or so. If you were extreme, you could generate 360 images, and use one for each angle. If you have hand moving 'smoothly'...you'd need a few more....lol
Reply #10 Friday, February 3, 2012 6:10 AM
I'm working on one that will eliminate the problem. No hands. lol
Reply #12 Friday, February 3, 2012 8:03 AM
Jim has already done that: https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/desktopx_widgets/1759/
That clock had balls! 
I think he just wants to talk about "jaggies" becaues they sound like "juggies", two of his favorite things. 
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Reply #1 Thursday, February 2, 2012 9:45 PM
It might be different Jim but can you use image files for the hand such as png or bmp? I have noticed simalar with sysmetrix when I used the program to draw the hands. I had better luck with png hands.