No Filter on opacity map - Any negatives?

[Morne]

Hi all

So I gave Forest Light a quick go with one of the free Xfrog trees. To my disappointment all the Xfrog stuff comes with opacity mapped leaves etc and not geometry. The tree is just over 200 000 polys and there are just over 91 000 of them in this view. The view looks over a plane that streches about 3km into the distance filled with trees.

Anyway as I said this was a quick test so I even used mostly default render settings. (well "low" universal settings). To my horror the 1st render at 720p took 1 hour on my Intel Q9550 with 8GB Ram (VRay 1.5SP3 Vista 64bit and Max2010 SP1 64bit). What???? 1 Hour? Did they not fix the bitmap pager. Switching it off or on, saving the file, closing and reoping renders in the same time. 1 Hour.

OK search the forum and see what others say. Hmm ok apparenlty switching off the filtering on the opacity mapped also works. Yup we're down to 8 minutes from 1 hour! Yippeeee!

1. OK so now what is the catch? Does this mean the leaves will flicker on an animation?
2. Will it look crap up close due to no filtering?
3. What are the negatives of doing it like this?

P.S.
Next I'm gonna try John's geometry replacement script when I get my hands on it.

[trick]

I rarely use any filtering at all. I just make sure my textures are adequate to just prevent seeing the single pixels. I only use filtering when I have so many textures that there will be a RAM problem and I have to downsize the textures so I will eventually see the single pixels...Watch out for Moire patterns on regular patterns, which appear when your texture resolution is to high. If you take good care of your textures you don't need filtering ! Flickering in the leaves is from bad AA, not from bad filtering !

[duke2]

Yes, the Xfrog trees are good but are opacity mapped, and thus slow as shit.

[Neilg]

I turn filtering off for a lot of my bitmaps, makes them a lot sharper.

You do need slightly higher AA settings to remove the flicker/noise though.

[joconnell]

Nah your normal AA should take care of the edges on the opacity map - you can leave a little blur on the diffuse if you want though.