What's the most "accurate" filtering method available for file textures?

V-Ray for Maya V-Ray for Maya :: General
1

Hi, I’m doing a render for arch viz. We have a facade that has perforated mesh (ie millions of tiny holes forming a pattern). I’m using a black and white (no grey) file texture that repeats into an VRayMtl opacity slot to accomplish this.

For example, attached is a photograph showing roughly the effect.

In our own render, we need to know exactly how “transparent” all these holes will look when we stand away from this building like 20metres away.

Trouble is the various methods, mipmap, off, quadratic etc.. all render very differently and I’m not sure which one is closest to what will happen in real life.
I don’t care about speed with this one, so which is the most accurate filtering method? Also should I turn on or of sub pixel mapping as that seems to also make a difference?

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2

Just render it out as big as you can and print it out at poster size then stand back.

3

What stezza said. Any filtering inside the computer will look different to how your eye perceives it, so better to just display it in high res, then back up and judge with your own eyes.
If you want to take filtering in vray out of the equation though, just render it at very high res, then scale it down in photoshop. It’ll still be filtered by photoshop, but it’ll be the same filtering as if you took a high res photograph and scaled that down the same way.

4

As the texture is black and white, set the color space to Raw for the most accurate results.

For the filter type, elliptical filtering is the most accurate texture filter in V-Ray, you can enable it in the additional V-Ray Texture attributes.

Using Smooth or Nearest and relying on the image sampler to clean the noise should also produce accurate results, but it can be slow.

Subpixel mapping disabled is more accurate.

5

Thanks for the help everyone.