Bring Out More Details in Some of your Applied Image Textures

Do some of your applied image textures look a little blurry when rendered?

Well, here's a tip that can easily add a little bit more crispness to some of those textures. This applies specifically to Image textures.

The parameter involved is called MipMap. It can be found in the Texture buttons window (F6), on the Map Image panel. This panel is only visible after having added an Image texture to your object.



MipMap

With the MipMap option enabled (the default), Blender will create several lower-resolution images of your texture and automatically use them based on the objects distance from the camera. Because less memory is require to process these low-res textures, render speeds can be enhanced, as well as increased framerates within the Game Engine.

However, this can sometimes result in less crisp textures, it depends on the texture and your preference for how things should look. The difference is usually subtle and it often requires doing some test renders, but it can often result in crisper looking image textures. This may not provide consistent results in an animation so, you'll need to do some comparision renders to be sure.

How it Works (from Wikipedia)
Each bitmap image of the mipmap set is a version of the main texture, but at a certain reduced level of detail. Although the main texture would still be used when the view is sufficient to render it in full detail, the renderer will switch to a suitable mipmap image (or in fact, interpolate between the two nearest, if trilinear filtering is activated) when the texture is viewed from a distance or at a small size. Rendering speed increases since the number of texture pixels ("texels") being processed can be much lower than with simple textures. Artifacts are reduced since the mipmap images are effectively already anti-aliased, taking some of the burden off the real-time renderer. Scaling down and up is made more efficient with mipmaps as well.

Here are two renders where the only settings difference is the MipMap option.


Find more info on the other options available on the Map Image panel.

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