Changing 3ds max's bitmap bluring default...Vray's AA

[Lupaz]

That'd be much appreciated. Thanks Macker.

[Joelaff]

Watch out for moire patterns, shimmering textures and bumps, etc.. I still think 0.1 is too low for all but product shots where the client demands you can read the writing on their box. It's just not realistic.

I would like the script to set them all to bout 1.0 to undo what other mess up by lowering it

[Neilg]

1 looks awful in animations. as the camera moves to see something at a glancing angle it turns to mush, it's way too extreme. we blur everything slightly in post anyway, it's turned off for consistency instead of sharpness.

[Joelaff]

The elliptic filter in the latest VRayHDRI is really the ideal. You get the sharpness and detail, without the issues of non-filtered texture maps.

Way to go Vlado! That's our new default.

[Macker]

Mass filtering script

[DPS]

The elliptic filter in the latest VRayHDRI is really the ideal. You get the sharpness and detail, without the issues of non-filtered texture maps.

Way to go Vlado! That's our new default.

That's good to know.

[rikou]

Mass filtering script

Thanks Macker

[Lupaz]

Thanks Maker

The elliptic filter in the latest VRayHDRI is really the ideal. You get the sharpness and detail, without the issues of non-filtered texture maps.

Way to go Vlado! That's our new default.

Cool.

[^Lele^]

The rule is simple: if a texture looks blurry when filtered, its resolution is too low for the intended use.
Filtering is needed for magnification/minification of mipmap levels, either precomputed or computed on the fly (tiled EXRs, or single-res bitmaps, respectively).
Say you are looking at a textured plane head on, and it covers all of your screen (which, let's assume, is 1024px square).
Your texture is 2048px square, and the renderer has to effectively choose which pixel to represent at rendertime, as there are twice (linearly) the pixels needed.
Without filtering, there would be no averaging of the pixels (4 into one, if we look at the pixel square), and so the renderer would be forced to pick one out of those 4.
Which MAY work for a static image, but will fall apart very rapidly if you zoom in or out or move the plane ever so slightly.
On the other hand, say we have a 256px image as texture.
Without filtering, again the renderer would have no choice but to pick the pixels it finds (in this case, one texture pixel every 16 in the frame buffer) and repeat them.
This WILL look sharp(er) than without filtering, but it will also look pixelated, as the texture coverage is too small.
Filtering the texture would, in this case, blur it once rendered, as the average would soften the texture's pixel edges when (under)represented on screen.
Filtering of a higher (ie. correct!) resolution texture than its projection on the rendered image will instead stabilize and enhance the texture sampling by the renderer, without appreciable blur (well, no blur at all, if the texture res is big enough.).

I'm adding a few samples of this behaviour (image names will tell you what it is you're looking at). Notice one thing: Elliptical filtering is NOT a cure for textures which have too small a resolution (as you can see from the samples, it sits between no filtering, and the standard pyramidal. and still looks crap.)



2k texture samples in the next post.

[^Lele^]

[Neilg]

I don't think that's the issue anyone has with filtering or why it gets turned off. It's that if you turn the surface 70degrees away from the camera or something, no matter the resolution pyrimidal turns it into a blurry mess.

[^Lele^]

the concept is the exact same.
Too low a texture resolution once projected on screen (as the vanishing point will compress it anisotropically, as opposed to the isotropic scale in my example above).
You'll notice the issue (texture-wise) is gone with procedurals (the LOW RES issue. one will still need elliptical filtering to avoid sparkling.).
Elliptical filtering is surely much better at preserving detail than any of the isotropic methods, especially in cases where the texture is slanted (and so, as said above, compressed anistropically) but it has much the same limits when one's asking too much from a too low-res texture.
Texture filtering ain't a new concept, so much so Wiki has a dedicated page for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_filtering

The no-filter approach is a remnant from the days of 3ds Dos, or thereabout, when memory was scarce, and textures exceedingly low res.
Bad habits always die hard.

[Neilg]

my apologies mastuh, i guess every time i've seen that happen i was mistaken somehow. As we all know you're never wrong.

This texture is 15,000 pixels wide in full, I guess it's just too low res to be rendered at 800x600



turning it off and letting vray handle it, or using something other than pyramidal does actually work. who'd have thought. It's got nothing to do with resolution, the topic was that pyramidal set to 1 is crap, and thats the default.

[^Lele^]

As i said, it's squished on one side, and isotropic filtering ain't gonna help much there.
No filtering ain't going to help either (unless, as stated above, you aren't moving PoV, hence changing texture projection on screen).

p.s.: it's been over 4 years since the VRayHDRI was well able to load any bitmap, and filter it much better than the max default. i guess that's what was missing in the thread.
p.p.s.: even summed area filtering does a better job than pyramidal at the cost of memory. and that's always been there.
p.p.p.s.: All images are rendered without AA. It's BAD to "let vray handle it". Seriously, bad. Unless you have nigh unlimited rendering resources.

here:

[3LP]

Ok, so VrayHDRI will now be my standard when I load maps.

Would there be a kind mind who could script a quick one that would transform any bitmaps node into a VrayHDRI with the elliptic filter selected?
I would just press that script now and then to make sure my scene is "converted".
Even set that up as pre-render script maybe...

This will let me go off the habit of disable the filtering straight in the global.

Thanks

Stan