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Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:
- Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
- Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
- Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
- Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
- Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
- Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.
Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.
By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.
Mip Mapping Textures
- Thread starter DJJose
- Start date
hcornea
Resource contributor
- Messages
- 2,388
- Country
MipMaps are lower resolution representations contained within the texture.
The idea is that these can be used by the rendering engine at increased distances, and this reduces the need for oversampling / graphics card filtering. Exactly when they will display depends on how the texture is mapped onto the object, related to its size, and component parts. viz. texel density.
For scenery favouring higher resolutons there may be tendency to want higher mips help for longer. There are also settings on Gfx card to adjust this (neg LOD bias, LOD Clamp etc)
Most scenery objects already incorporate MipMaps in their textures. Usually if they don't it is by design and may be for a couple of reasons:
1) use of texture resolutions > 1024 x 1024, which are not natively supported by FSX, without altering the texture max load setting in fsx.cfg
2) to deliberately "force" the higher resolution imagery to render, indepedent of mapped texel density and distance.
In short, if you add MIPs where they were not before, the possible side-effect is blurry / low-resolution textures.
Your best visual option would be to use higher filtering settings on your Gfx hardware, however:
You could experiment with opening the relevant dds textures in a program (like dxtbmp) and saving them with MipMaps (dxtbmp will do this automatically) .. to reduce the filtering requirements in FSX.
Be aware, as described above, that this may very well make scenery elements blurred, if the original designer did not intend this to be the case.
As with all things, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
The idea is that these can be used by the rendering engine at increased distances, and this reduces the need for oversampling / graphics card filtering. Exactly when they will display depends on how the texture is mapped onto the object, related to its size, and component parts. viz. texel density.
For scenery favouring higher resolutons there may be tendency to want higher mips help for longer. There are also settings on Gfx card to adjust this (neg LOD bias, LOD Clamp etc)
Most scenery objects already incorporate MipMaps in their textures. Usually if they don't it is by design and may be for a couple of reasons:
1) use of texture resolutions > 1024 x 1024, which are not natively supported by FSX, without altering the texture max load setting in fsx.cfg
2) to deliberately "force" the higher resolution imagery to render, indepedent of mapped texel density and distance.
In short, if you add MIPs where they were not before, the possible side-effect is blurry / low-resolution textures.
Your best visual option would be to use higher filtering settings on your Gfx hardware, however:
You could experiment with opening the relevant dds textures in a program (like dxtbmp) and saving them with MipMaps (dxtbmp will do this automatically) .. to reduce the filtering requirements in FSX.
Be aware, as described above, that this may very well make scenery elements blurred, if the original designer did not intend this to be the case.
As with all things, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.