Upscaling a no anti-aliasing animation from 1080p to 4K

[Title In Large]

Hello TVP community! I'm trying to achieve nice curves from up-scaling a no-anti-aliasing animation in 1080p to 4K. Now because the lines are pixel-crisp, I'm having to work around this by defaulting my projects in 5K and drawing thicker strokes, later compressing the document down to 4K when the animation is done - smoothing the strokes into believable anti-a clean outlines. This isn't bad and I'm always guaranteed a smooth curve almost all the time, but in terms of memory and PC consumption, it begins to take its toll.

Would anybody happen to know a way to make this work the other direction? I'm in the midst of doing online streaming with animation work and the CPU takes a massive dive when working on a 4K+ document. All of this is manageable offline but when streaming, it's different (1080p docs seem more than fine). Ideally I'd want to keep the anti-aliasing disabled to keep the colouring phase painless and also keep the "Sketch panel" tools from turning messy during cleaning up the animation, if possible.

I've given it some experimenting but the results as you'll see from the attached image are still blocky. What you'll see is a 1080p doodle copied 3 times, each given it's own unique treatment > Modify document to 4K> Play with Histogram FX.

My specs are as follows if this helps:
Windows 10 Pro
Intel Core i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz
1TB SSD
4TB HDD
16GB RAM
GeForce GTX 1080

All of my "Preview Setting" options are unchecked, all of my animation documents are loaded from the SSD for minimum fuss on CPU (at least I hope it's gone down) and I stream in 720p 30fps.
Your advice, efficiency tips and expertise is welcome. Be it settings on TV Paint, PC parts to consider upgrading or industry insight.

Thank you.

[D.T. Nethery]

That's interesting that you are upscaling from 1080p to 4K . As a rule I've always been told that working with any sort of pixel art , whether in Photoshop or TVPaint , it is better not to upscale the artwork from 1920 x 1080 to 4K. My own workflow is to start overscale at 3K (3072 x 1728) or 4K (4096 x 2304) resolution, then scale down for final output to 1920 x 1080.

[slowtiger]

Upscaling any line art is ... problematic. And you will definitely not get a smooth line from that, no matter which trickery you attempt. Depending on your expectations of quality, the better solution might be to get a computer which works with 4K. I started that 2 yrs ago, and it works even on my old machine with 8 GB RAM.

The obsession with non-antialiased lines for workflow (not for design purposes) is something I don't ever understand. TVP offers so many tools for many different workflows. The Fill tool works great, my personal workflow is to colour on one or more different layers from the line art layer, use a bit of Expand to colour under my sketchy lines, and voilà. No problem to make changes later.

(I started to go on ranting about how nowadays these kids don't do proper planning anymore and expect to be able to change everything in the last minute, but then I remembered my coffee and that the world needs less of that kind of rant, and, peace. Maybe I should do a little tutorial about workflow and colouring.)

[Title In Large]

You'd be right, D.T. Nethery as I was told the same thing. lol.

Slowtiger it's not so much as an obsession a "curious question". I used to animate and handle the colouring identical to your workflow, yet the No AA has personally opened up a new way for me to retain all of my strokes along with the Sketch Panel for a very quick way of modifying existing strokes as well as mixing in the Line colorize (https://www.tvpaint.com/doc/tvp11/index ... e-enhanced) which makes shading and lighting a pleasant breeze with lots of opportunities open for the colour pallet. Not to mention to damn corners void of fill are sorted in an instant and textured strokes no longer pin the colour layer(s) down with dodgy pixelation holes or bleeding.

Please don't get the impression that this post is intended to egg on people. No method is wrong. It is just a curious means to see if No AA scaling can be done, as of course drawing on a smaller canvas is far more efficient that drawing on a big one. Otherwise nothing is lost. If anything the animation never feels "delicious" up close because of the pixel rigidity over the smooth strokes of AA, but you get to eat the cake at the end when it is resized down when the composition is done. It's as close to vector as you can get but without the brush engine commonly betraying you.

[slowtiger]

Hm. If I want to draw "efficiently", as you call it, I just zoom out. I do have scenes where I have some kind of thumbnails first, but I just enlarge them in the project and use them for reference, I just draw/animate over them. (That's the Joanna Quinn approach, btw.)