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Best filter for displacement maps


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I think it depends on your uses. When I was trying to match a high detail and high displacement map with something out of ZBrush I had to turn off the filtering. Then it 95% match pixel/pixel. All the active filtering just blurred or mangled the map for me.

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Turning off filtering altogether opens us up to aliasing, which is particularly noticeable for displacements when object/lights move through the scene. I thought the radial basis spline (B-spline) was the preferred choice for displacements as it is a piecewise polynominal function that better captures the high frequency detail common in displacement maps.   I don't see filter amongst the Texture vex node's filter type options (Bartlett/Triangular, Sinc Sharpening, Hanning, Blackman, Catmull-Rom, & Mitchell) that would do something similar.

Edited by rheniser
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Actually there is no such thing as a "perfect filter for displacement" :)

 

It really depends from the displacement texture "contents", the texture can be a procedural or an actual file texture (ultimately also the procedural gets mipmapped prior rendering but it should have its own filtering too within the procedural code). Think about a texture as a "signal"or (just imagine a texture is a 2D math function: there is no one-filtering-to-rule-them-signals all.

 

And as it has been said the 'no filtering' option (which is basically point sampling) is definitely not a good choice.

 

The best you can do is:

 

- use a 16 bit float depth texture (exr half) or a float 32 bit EXR/TIFF

- keep resolution reasonably high

- edit: you might want to check in case you use a procedural if its functions are properly anti-aliased

Edited by pbd
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