mipmapping

As textures minify (word?) the pixels are of course not all able to draw. If you move the camera/object just slightly, it can affect SOME of the pixels drawn. This gives horrible sparkling effects.
Also, the visual clarity of a mipmap is generally more visually accurate than linear filtering. Anisotropic filtering (or trilinear mipmapping) gives me by FAR quality rendering of distant planes. These effects are most noticeable when the distant plane's normal is almost perpendicular to the viewing angle (such as far away floors).
3Digest has nice page which details this.


Edited by - Elixir on July 29, 2001 3:57:15 AM

thanks, i just read the article.
but how do i do anisotropic filtering?

i don''t know but mipmapping is faster on my gfx than linear filtering. maybe my card is optimized for it or something. i have a s3/diamond viper2

mipmapping will improve performance on all cards
the reason being when a texture is a little ways away GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST will use a say 4x4 sized texture but GL_LINEAR will have to use the original sized texture say 256x256.
but thats not the main benifit from mipmapping its main benefit is its gets rid of most of the aliasing problems.

that helps a lot
thanks