I was noticing some unexpected results using textures in shaders, and I am pretty sure it is from textures not having mipmapping enabled.
In QC, if you use the Image Texturing Properties patch, it will format the texture so that mipmapping is enabled; so when you feed shaders with various random textures and patterns, it winds up looking MUCH better in some cases. In some cases, without mipmapping, the results will look very broken.
Maybe there is some way that a patch that samples texture could have the mipmapping flags added, and then if it’s placed in between a the texture and a shader, it would work out? Or maybe a parameter on the image importers or something? I haven’t poked around in the source in awhile.
Some way to fix image quality would be good. Unfortunately not as simple as just adding a flag, but… Created feature request Improve quality when downscaling images.
I see this basically addressed in the link, but try to be as specific as possible about the “problem case” I run into, it is most often an issue if one uses textures as tiled repeating patterns.
A simple example would be to look at a repeating pattern on a sprite, and then rotate it so that it is positioned as a “floor” in a 3D scene. When mipmapping is enabled, it mitigates moire effect that happens in these type of scenarios.
There are other cases where it is also useful; some blur techniques for example. But I bring it up more for scene rendering quality. Â