filter maps for GI

[Guest]

In the Vray help it states:

Filter maps for GI - enable or disable texture filtering during GI calculations and glossy reflections/refractions. When off (the default), texture maps are not filtered for GI and glossy reflections/refractions in order to speed up the calculations. If this option is on, textures will be filtered in these cases.

Mines on as default :/ which is the right option? what are the main reasons for it being on/off? what situations require it on?

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/200R...s_switches.htm

Thanks,

[vlado]

Originally this option was off for two reasons: one was speed, and the other one - a bug in the 3ds Max bitmap filtering code that caused invalid colors and splotches in older versions of 3ds Max.

However, turning filtering off means that the full texture resolution will be sampled for GI rays; for scenes with lots of large textures when some of the them are paged to disk (either through the 3ds Max Bitmap pager, or VRayHDRI as tiled OpenEXR files) this means a lot of data being constantly (re)loaded from disk when a less detailed mip-map level of the texture would have worked just as well. In these cases it is better to keep the filtering enabled for GI rays.

In short, it's the old speed vs memory thing again - for a particular scene, you will have to try which setting works better. There is no particular "right" setting (if there was, we wouldn't put it as a setting at all )

Best regards,
Vlado