Digital Art Zone

What makes this happen?  It was a figure from the My Objects of my C8.5 area, that I moved over to my C8.1 area, and then dropped in the scene.  It seems to know what texture, but the little texture ball is not there, and the shader of the whole figure is grey?

Hi,

8.5 defaults to Mip-Map filtering which is not available in 8.1 (a good new feature)

Try changing the filtering method in the dropdown box on the texture settings. It’s actually showing blank right now.

RoguePilot - 12 January 2013 01:20 AM

8.5 defaults to Mip-Map filtering which is not available in 8.1 (a good new feature)

Any info on this? Anyone have a test file that shows the difference?

It’s exactly what is presented in the pic above.
Check out the blue box for “Filtering:”
it’s empty. That’s what Rogue Pilot was saying. It has nothing, because 8.5 already changed it to “Fast MipMap” and 8.1 doesn’t have that. Just put an allocation in that box and it’s fixed. But whene you have a lot of shaders with image files… um…
That’s why I completely copied my entire Browser from one to the next, and each version uses it’s own - all because of that issue, right there.

I get the same results when using geografted items. Textures on the main model loads fine and on the geografted bit it’s fine until you connect it to the main model. Then you get messed up textures. Changing filter type does nothing to fix this. Me thinks geografting is still a bit broken in Carrara.

I think Holly was referring to the use of Mip-Mapping in Carrara rather than the original problem.

The problem with demonstrating the Mip-mapping is that it’s more of a memory and rendering efficiency feature than a visual feature.

If it’s working properly you shouldn’t see any visual difference (or not much anyway, I can show some variation with my extreme textures that are designed to produce moire patterns).

Where the effect would be experienced is in better memory management when the renderer starts using the textures. The Mip-Mapping should reduce the texture size based on the object size in the camera view thus saving on resources. This feature is already used for game engines where the mip-maps are pre-stored in the texture format.

So, if you’re doing a large scene and are pushing the memory limits of your computer, that’s when you’ll notice the difference, otherwise not so much. It should also smooth out the ‘speckles’ that you can get in an animation as pixels on the texture are crossed by the rendered pixels.

Holly, am I right that you are finding that 8.5 handles memory better?

Harry Dresden - 13 January 2013 04:39 AM

I get the same results when using geografted items. Textures on the main model loads fine and on the geografted bit it’s fine until you connect it to the main model. Then you get messed up textures. Changing filter type does nothing to fix this. Me thinks geografting is still a bit broken in Carrara.

You’re right about the geografted textures but that’s another issue. Hopefully to be fixed in the final release. (No arguments about when please, I know, I know)

In this case it’s definitely the texture filtering, 8.1 will not be able to load the texture filter setting of ‘fast mip-map’ (stored in the .car file) because it doesn’t recognise it and doesn’t auto-select another option. If it has no instruction on how to filter you get the equivalent of no shader at all, the object will show through to the Carrara background just like a shadow catcher.