Bitmap Filtering

[pixelstudio]

Hello people,

have a look at this image:


the left side you can see the problem. the faces towards the camera are sharp.
the more a face is away from the camera. the more a bitmap get blurred.

Well the right has the bitmap filter on Summed Area filter instead of pyramidal(default)
the right one look much better.
But everywhere i read this takes much more memory. now we are getting more unhandled expetions and my guess would be this is the problem. cause it's the first time we are testing with summed area.

So if any1 has an idea i would like to know:
- summed area uses more memory, if i for example have a texture of 2048x2048 maybe some1 has an idea what the difference is between pyramidal and summed in % ( example summed costs 50% more then the other or sumthing)
- is there a other way to correct this instead of using summed area?

Vlado:
The VrayBMPFilter also look much better, does this also have impact on memory use?can it be compared with summed area memory wise?
This filter looks even better then summed area, so i hope this is memory low.. ?

Thanks in advance

[Neilg]

I turn bitmap filtering off completley in pretty much all of my scenes now. Less memory use, and sharper than both potentially because it uses your AA. If you end up having to lower your settings in an animation though, it wont look good - you need at least 1,8 DMC for a still and up to 1,10 for animation.

A lot of it is how you can prioritise your maps too - you wont need summed area on all of your bitmaps, only a select few.

I think its either double the memory compared to pyrimidal for summed area or 4 times the memory. Either way, its quite a bit more.

[rivoli]

when rendering still images I turn off filtering altogether too, maps just look much better than filtered by max.
doing animation it's another story though, having no filtering on maps can cause quite some flickering. pyramidal does just fine though, details tend to be lost anyway at video resolution with softening filters and mblur.

[natty]

when rendering still images I turn off filtering altogether too, maps just look much better than filtered by max.
doing animation it's another story though, having no filtering on maps can cause quite some flickering. pyramidal does just fine though, details tend to be lost anyway at video resolution with softening filters and mblur.

Agree totaly ... we do the same..

[pixelstudio]

thats clears things up allot! it seem the vrayBMPFilter applies also no filter, so that will give the same result as filtering none.
Very helpfull. thx

[m_hinks]

Thats an interesting approach, turning the filtering off for stills. I might have to have a little test with that. Is this a common practise?

[vlado]

It seem the vrayBMPFilter applies also no filter, so that will give the same result as filtering none.

Not exactly, there is a difference if you look at the map from really close, like the attached images (the VRayBmpFilter image is more smooth). If you look at the image from far away though, the difference between the two is very small.

Best regards,
Vlado

[beestee]

Thats an interesting approach, turning the filtering off for stills. I might have to have a little test with that. Is this a common practise?

I can testify to the value in using low or no filtering in materials for stills...it will help with unwanted texture blur on any surface that is from 45 degrees to perpendicular with the camera. However you have to be careful about moire creeping into your stills by getting a good handle on your image sampling settings.

I am curious about the converse, and may have a word of warning before you change all of your maps to have low or no filtering.

As of right now, all of the maps in all of the materials we use have the filtering set to none and in the procedural maps that do not have a filtering option, the blur is set to 0.2. We are heavily biassed towards still rendering. Recently, though, we have been dabbling a little more in animation, and we have to set our adaptive DMC image sampling to 1/12 and our DMC noise threshold to .003 to get rid of the heavy noise due to this lack of filtering in our materials.

Would it be good practice to go ahead and set our blur to 1.0 and our filtering to Pyramydal in all of our maps, then in the global switches turn off map filtering for our stills? Does this function affect the filtering of procedural maps?

Thanks in advance!

[3LP]

I was wondering about all that and found some good answers here
But my question was, for stills, if you disable the filtering for the maps, what's the amount of blur that you guys put in textures ?
Default is at 1.0
Noticed that 0.5 does look better in bump and in general aspect. But the more I go down, the more noise I have in the image, what's normal. But what is your general setting ? Not 0.01, do you ?