Mip Maps make things look flat from distance

Coontang

I've noticed when trying to get nice detailed renders of a character I'm working on that the mip maps are making it look very flat from distance.

Because I have a lot of materials it's a bit annoying to turn all of the mip maps off.

For the Marmoset guys: Is there/could you add in a future update a global way to disable mipmaps? Maybe have an option to just do it for the actual capture to help with performance. Or more control to limit how far the mipmaps can go.

Or am I just doing something completely wrong?

This is a section of a larger render to illustrate.

Normal mip map on



and off

almighty_gir

I'm very much in favour of having global parameter settings for materials. It's something that is already on our suggestion board, so it'll make it's way in at some point i'm sure.

Coontang

That's good to know. From further experimentation it appears that turning off mip maps disables the skins normal smoothness setting which is why I'm seeing a difference. Maybe I just had normal smoothing too high.

almighty_gir

Well, normal smoothing relies on mipmaps to work, the more you smooth the normals, the higher the mipmap level is sampled, essentially using a blurry normalmap to give the illusion of "smoothed normals". So disabling mipmaps would have the result of disabling normal smoothing.

Coontang

That makes sense. It basically means that a different normal smoothing amount is needed for close ups than for full character because the effect is multiplied at distance. Not sure if there's any way around that. Maybe disabling the standard mip maps when normal smoothing is being used rather than having both.