Am I the only one who didn't know this button!!!

[Matt Sugden]

I have just been messing around in max trying to figure out why my road texture (which goes off to a vanishing point in the distance) was just turning into a fuzzy mess. I tried all sorts, mostly in the rendering roll out, then it occured to me to have a look at the material itself. Then!! i found this option, bitmap filtering, set to pyramidal always by default

 

I've used max for the last 7 years or so, never knew about this option. It has literally transformed the texture from looking unusable to looking crisp and sharp. I'm certain I'll be using this a lot more in the future for pavements, floors etc. If you don't know what it does I suggest you try it!!

[Dave Buckley]

I use it a lot, but it can be quite a drain on resources I believe.

 

Good to see your cracking on with the Civils stuff

[CJI]

Yeah i knew about it but only use when I have too, as like david said. It does have a good bit bigger impact on memory usage.

 

I will admit though that im fairly new to the Texture filter party as well so don't feel too bad. haha

[Ricardo Eloy]

You could also lower the blur value for the texture. Might help in some cases and no be as painful on the system.

[beestee]

Where you can run into problems with doing this is textures with small patterns that are susceptible to moire, crawling surfaces in animation, and also longer render times as mentioned. VRay's image filtering takes control when Max's bitmap filtering is set to none, so VRay will have more work to do (i.e. longer rendering times), and you will probably have to use higher settings to get clean results for the moire and crawling surfaces.

 

In most cases, leaving the filtering on, but set to a low value (I typically use 0.2 for my stills) can aid in fixing these issues while still giving a good crisp look at glancing angles...and it gives the VRay image sampler a bit of a break allowing you to use lower settings and get faster renders.

 

All of that said, if you are looking for the ultimate quality in rendering you will want to set the filtering to none and use high settings in VRay and just deal with the increase in render time.