Pixelated Highlights

[jlcox5]

Hi All,

I've been working on creating some textures with inlays on them, and have run into an issue when trying to render things with IRay. When rendered at a reasonable distance, edges render specular highlights that are very pixelated looking. When you zoom in, they smooth out substantially. I've messed with blurring the normal maps some, thinking that the edges might be too sharp, and that's what's causing it, but nothing has helped.

I've also bumped up the iterations to 25k, also with no apparent difference. I'm wondering if there is an IRay setting or something that I am missing here to get this to smooth out a bit. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you all for your time!


Zoomed Out


Zoomed In

Kind Regards,
Jon

[pimhendriks]

Would be helpful if you add an image of that normal map

[jlcox5]

Absolutely, and thank you for the response. =)

Here are two normal maps, one of just the inset edge, and one where it is combined with the two materials. I'm a bit of a noob with a lot of this stuff, so if there is anything else I should be sharing, please let me know.


Edge Only


Combined

[Palirano]

To me it looks like you might have too low of a bit depth. Maybe try increasing everything normal-related to 16-bit?

[jlcox5]

Thank you very much for taking the time to make a suggestion. I went through and changed the Output Format on everything from 8 bit to 16, and didn't seem to notice any changes, unfortunately. I wonder if it's related to how I'm generating the normals in the first place? I'm basically taking a black and white image, using an edge detection node to find the outline, and then running it through a series of curve, HQ blur and and invert grayscale nodes to generate the normals.



If there is a better way to approach this, I would love to hear any suggestions or thoughts. I'm almost embarrassed to say how long I've been working on this particular problem at this point.

After playing around a bit more, I was able to mitigate the issue somewhat by adjusting the curve nodes to sort of smooth out the output of the edge detection, and by adjusting the roughness of the material to have highlights that weren't quite as sharp. It didn't fix it completely, however.

Thank you again for your time!

[jlcox5]

Just a small update here... I managed to fix the issue completely by increasing the resolution of the image files I was importing to use as the mask, and saving them out with 16bit channels. With that, the change to the other nodes made a noticeable difference. Thank you all for the help and suggestions.