Making good mipmaps?

Artich0ke

Anyone know of a tutorial, for example of recommended settings in the nvidia dds photoshop plugin, especially for textures using an alpha channel. Or maybe someone can give me some pro tips here

I'm mostly doing environmental textures, plants, trees. I've so far always used the default (triangle) mipmap filter.

I guess my questions are;

Which is the best mipmap filter for textures using an alpha channel (leaves, for example)?

Is it advisable to have more than 10 mipmap levels (let's take a 2048x2048 texture as an example)? The later mipmaps comes off extremely pixelated, and the alpha channel is just a pixelated mess since the resolution is so low, is this even usefull to achieve its "antialiasing" effect?

Is more mipmaps better or worse for performance?

Thanks a ton.

Ben Apuna

If you've got access to a programmer or tech artist who can make sense of this. It's the best solution I've seen to this problem by far, unfortunately I'm not sure how it works.

Artich0ke

He's talking about alpha threshold setting in the engine, its usually not a problem, at least havent been for me, but i guess it depends on the engine. If they disapear like that the threshold is set way too high.

AlecMoody

I also want to know more about how the different mipmap filters behave.

Frankie

Try Kaiser;

http://number-none.com/product/Mipmapping,%20Part%202/index.html

(and gamma correction?)

You might find that your problem is coming from the filtering and turning up/on ansio would help.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering

Mips are essential for performance! But actually before that can be said for sure you would need to do profile your scene/game (I've no idea how to do that sorry!)

Artich0ke

I did a comparison between different mipmap filters, and yes Kasier is quite nice, good balance of detail and antialiasing effect. "Triangle", which is the default, makes the textures a bit too blurry for my taste, but the antialiasing effect is nice. "Point" is extremely different, needs high level of anti-aliasing to not shimmer, no AA-effect whatsoever, very detailed.

CheeseOnToast

Try using Nvidia Mipster instead. It installs alongside the dds plugin so you'll already have it. Check in file>scripts in Photoshop. It's a nice simple interface and often gives better results than the standard dds exporter, particularly with 1-bit alpha.