Textures are blurring as you get further from the camera

Dippndots

Heyo,

I'm having a strange problem in 3ds max (default and mental ray renderer) where as you can see below my textures start to blur horribly as they get further away from the camera and towards the vanishing point.

No camera or render effects are enabled and as you can see by the second pic form the opposite angle it isn't the texture thats physically blurry.

There are about 3 different maps on the mesh, all 3 (if rendered individually) cause the same problem.

Any idea whats causing this?

Eric Chadwick

Summed-Area Filtering improves this.
http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/index.html?url=files/GUID-6D4F4DB0-12EA-4B38-B14F-8DBF821ADC5F.htm,topicNumber=d30e603151

Supersampling is another solution.
http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/index.html?url=files/GUID-97BC995B-D697-488E-B4FC-4AE8B07537DC.htm,topicNumber=d30e369534

Noors

In your bitmap nodes, there's also a blur parameter that you can reduce to 0.1

Adam L. Gray

You may also want to have a look at Anisotropic filtering. Nitrous seems to handle this rather well, never noticed any problems with it myself anyway. As for for the standard direct x driver, have a look at the following image, bottom left: http://tutorial-z.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/3.jpg

You can access this menu through the max preferences: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3oQUYbdepfY/T1_MUHXhWeI/AAAAAAAAAng/COwyjl8TwW8/s320/driver%2Bconfiguration02.jpg

/edit: oh.. render, nvm, these prolly won't make a difference then

Dippndots

Cheers guys, I needed to reduce the blur on all the bitmaps to .01 (why is default at 1?!). I also had to turn on the supersampler too.

Spiffy664

I'm going to take a stab in the dark that default blur is 1 because its attempting to fake a little realism, that things lose detail and get "blurry" (not literally, thus the fake) the further away they get from us.

Try reading a sign thats really far away while driving to experience this phenomenon. Its also a good test for your eye sight

JamesWild

Just looks like bog standard mipmapping to me. You can see the border of the white being pushed to meet pixel boundaries and the linear interpolation is quite visible. There's also a fade so I'd say it's trilinear. Surprised Mental Ray uses it by default and not a supersampling algorithm.


I've always thought it's an especially odd artifact as it causes divergence with distance in most cases.

Dippndots

Here's what it looks like now, render times are the same, so if no one has objections, I'll leave as is?

JamesWild

Looks pretty good to me!