Wood Grain getting lost in render

[Streetwise]

I am fairly new to all of this, but I'm having an issue with getting the wood grain to be as pronounced (or somewhat pronounced) as the original map scan.
I know there's a plethora of settings an that it could be my material, but then again, it could be the V-Ray Plane lights causing glare. I've tried everything I can think of.

Material:
Diffuse is set to the map material, Blur has been set down to .2 (this helped a lot)
Reflect is set to a value of 10
Refl. glossiness is at .55
Subdivs 12
Bump is 10, set for a bump map made from PS (Highlight Pass filter used, contrast added)

I've tried making a specular map and using that, but I loose ALL of the grain then.


DriftwoodDreams.zip

Are there some other things I could try with respect to the materials, or lighting? I know that's loaded question!

[Neilg]

Turn filtering off in the bitmap settings, and you could throw it into a colour correct map and up the contrast slightly. Your grey environment wont be helping either, try rendering it with a hdri or studio lighting setup.

[Morbid Angel]

using vray hdr loader you could use vray custom filters, which can be better in producing accurate sharpness in the textures.

[Morne]

set texture blur to 0.01 down from the default of 1.0

[Streetwise]

Thanks all for your awesome suggestions. The biggest single thing was to create a seamless cove for the product. For some reason, the V-Ray Plane caused the wood grain in the material to wash out whereas the cyc doesn't. The second biggest help was to reduce the texture blur down to .01. Huge improvement. Lastly, i turned off bitmap filtering and created a color-corrected bump map. Not sure how much those things helped, but at least I've got my wood grain back where it should be!

It's great to be able to come here and post questions as a newbie and come away with excellent advice that got the results I was after! Thanks so much!

Dave

[Neilg]

The second biggest help was to reduce the texture blur down to .01.
i turned off bitmap filtering

These are basically the same thing.

[Streetwise]

Ahh. So it sounds like turning off the bitmap filter is the on/off switch approach, and reducing the texture blur is the dimmer switch approach? So if you turn off the bitmap filter, does the texture blur control even do anything then?

[Morbid Angel]

the textures must be blurred. Otherwise they create extra work for the sampler.

[Morne]

the textures must be blurred. Otherwise they create extra work for the sampler.

Interesting. The 1st thing I ALWAYS do is switch the blur to 0.01. Otherwise the textures err well uhm blur This is very annoying on things like floor tiling patterns, grass, well any surface really. Looks fine close, but quickly blurs at angles and distances. For archviz this just looks wrong

[Morbid Angel]

that is why I had suggested using vray hdr loaders custom filters, which still filter the texture but produce a very nice and sharp result. We use tiled exrs in production, and a custom filter with Nearest/Biquadratic produces very fine texture even at odd angles.

[Streetwise]

that is why I had suggested using vray hdr loaders custom filters,

Is there a tutorial on that somewhere? All I can come up with is info on HDRI. Thanks!

[Morbid Angel]

I don't think there are tutorials about this topic yet. Maybe some one can write one. For now, if you simply load a texture using vray hdr loader, and compare the result with regular 3ds max texture, you can see that the filtering is better at the same render time cost. If you reduce the blur value a little bit, for example 0.5, the texture gets much more crisp, however that does not impact the render time either.

[windowlicker]

To get more detail out of my textures (at the expense of memory consumption and render times), I set the interpolation mode for the texture to "summed area" (instead of the default "pyramidal") and I set the DMC sampler to 1/6 (instead of the default 1/4). I keep the bitmap blur at no lower than 0.5.

[Streetwise]

To get more detail out of my textures (at the expense of memory consumption and render times), I set the interpolation mode for the texture to "summed area" (instead of the default "pyramidal") and I set the DMC sampler to 1/6 (instead of the default 1/4). I keep the bitmap blur at no lower than 0.5.

Thanks. Yes, I did find info on using Pyraidal wich does help, but I'm not sure by what you mean with a setting of 1/6 in the DMC Sampler? I'm using:

Adaptive amount: 0.85
Noise Threshold: 0.005
Min Samples: 8
Global subdivs multiplier: 3.0
Time independent box, ticked (not sure what that does)

Thanks.

[windowlicker]

Alright, to clarify: Set the bitmap filtering to "Summed Area" - NOT "Pyramidal". Set blur to "0.5". Set min subdivs to 1, max subdivs to 6 in your "Adaptive DMC image sampler" on the "V-ray" tab of the render dialogue.
This way you will have better filtering of the bitmap, and the image sampler will pick up fine details better in the actual render.