MipMap Bias in Maya

Arno

Hi,

At the moment I am working on a cloth shader.
And the filtering of Normal DetailMap has a great effect on the look of the effect.

Any type of filtering will drasticly average the small details in my normal map, making the surface appear to smooth.
No Filtering will cause extremely noisy surfaces, and if you get very close to a texture you can seen the actual pixels ( Playstation 1 style )

I was wondering if you can change the mipmap bias in Maya, so it uses the highest mip longer. This will fix the smoothing of my normals far away and still give me filtering up close.

throttlekitty

I'm not aware of how to do it for viewport shaders, but some renderers have a mipmap bias. It would be helpful to state which you're using.

Burpee

have you tried to lower your mipmap filtering radius, or in the render setting ?

Arno

Okay, I tried pre-filter. But it doesn't do anything visible.
I'm expecting to find a mip-map bias input here where I can punch in a number. But no luck.

Burpee

Check under the " Effects " you can control it for there

Arno

I don't believe so, it just has a filter slider.

Eric Chadwick

If you use Shader FX you can control this. Or at least I would be extremely surprised if it didn't support this.

Arno

I'm currently rendering this in Mental ray, so I would like to stick to the MILA shader.

sprunghunt

If you want to blur your image in mental ray turn on the pre-filter. It's the checkbox in your first image under "mipmap". Then you can adjust the pre-filter radius. I find 2-3 is a good value. 

I would also switch your filter mode to quadratic. It just gives the best results. 

Pre filter won't do anything visible in the viewport. It will only happen at render time.