I am making a large room with marble walls. I am having trouble getting a
texture as detailed as marble look nice at a far distance. I made a simple
scene to demonstrate the problem:

#include "colors.inc"
#include "stones.inc"

box{0, 100 texture {T_Stone27}}
light_source {50 rgb 1}
camera {location 1 look_at <0, 0, 50> }

With no antialiasing, this looks terrible. It's not much better with +a0.3.
The only way I can get it to look half-decent is with +a0.0 +am2 which
takes a very long time to render, and still has a fake, drained-out look
about it. How do I make a detailed texture look nice even from far away?

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Please note that this problem is only at a lower resolution, such as
512x384. At 1280x1024, it looks half-decent (I just tried) especially with
+a0.3. But in my particular case, I have walls at even larger distances
from the camera, which would look bad even at such a high resolution. Of
course, even without antialiasing, rendering at such a high resolution
takes time. I do have the option of leaving off the fancy antialiasing and
then just turning it on for a final render, but I still have the problem
that with such extreme antialiasing it looks quite washed out. Also, it
would be niced to be able to be able to see something of what it will look
like as I work on it from an artistic point of view.
So that brings me back to the question - how do I make detailed textures
look nice from far away?

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For test renders, I recommend using a simpler pigment that doesn't take so
long to look nice. (Just a solid color, for instance.) Then you can test
without heavy anti-aliasing.

To make it look nice with anti-aliasing, start with +a0.1 +am2 and then play
with values for +r. +r5 looks pretty good to me. Higher will be
better/slower.

Now, if you don't like the way it looks with that much anti-aliasing, then
the problem is that the features on your texture are so small that at a
distance they blur into almost a single color. That's not a problem with
anti-aliasing, it's a problem with the texture.

 - Slime
 [ http://www.slimeland.com/ ]

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Well the trick they use in real-time graphics is mip mapping, which 
effectively blurs the texture according to it's distance from the camera 
(well I'm over-simplifying that a bit). You could get something similar in 
pov by fading your texture to a different pattern that looks right at a 
distance... but that's a pretty lame answer to your question!

The advantage is that you can then tweak it to look good with no 
anti-aliasing without screwing up how it looks up close.

-- 
Tek
http://evilsuperbrain.com

"clum" <nomail@nomail> wrote in message 
news:web.4531f4dfb745552628f573980@news.povray.org...
>I am making a large room with marble walls. I am having trouble getting a
> texture as detailed as marble look nice at a far distance. I made a simple
> scene to demonstrate the problem:
>
> #include "colors.inc"
> #include "stones.inc"
>
> box{0, 100 texture {T_Stone27}}
> light_source {50 rgb 1}
> camera {location 1 look_at <0, 0, 50> }
>
> With no antialiasing, this looks terrible. It's not much better with 
> +a0.3.
> The only way I can get it to look half-decent is with +a0.0 +am2 which
> takes a very long time to render, and still has a fake, drained-out look
> about it. How do I make a detailed texture look nice even from far away?
>
>

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