Tool Wishlist

Mipmaps:

Mipmaps are incredibly useful for film production. Due to the resolution of the final image (2k), and more films going IMAX (4k), it's becoming more and more necessary to use larger texture maps, especially for characters that will be seen full-frame / closeup. As bitmaps become larger, memory needs increase, so anything that can help reduce the memory footprint of your scene is a big bonus. With mipmaps, your scene will load smaller versions of your bitmaps for objects that are further from camera, which can be a huge memory saver, as well as time saver, since the user doesn't have to export multiple reses of the same texture.

Currently, you can use mipmaps, but only in mentalray, and even in mentalray the process i really complex. Here's the steps...

1) Go to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2010\mentalray\shaders_standard\include and edit the file base.mi in a text editor
2) Then search for the text 'gui "gui_mib_texture_lookup2" {' and then put a hash (#) in front of the word 'hidden'
3) Go to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2010\ in a command shell and use the imf_copy.exe program to convert a bitmap into a mipmap. For example, you can type...

imf_copy -p -r name.tga name.map

where -p is pyramidal filtering and -r is divide intop blocks
4) Start max
5) Go to an Arch & Design material, select the diffuse color, add a mib_texture_lookup2 map and select in the list of formats "All Image Files". Then select your .map file.

To read more, go here... http://www.mymentalray.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-466.html

This technique is cumbersome and time consuming. What I would like to see is the following...

1) A GUI for this conversion process that would either be a macroscript in max or a utility in the Utility Panel, something like this...

2) A wider variety of formats that can be converted to a .map file. For example, a tiff with LZW compression, a VERY common format in photoshop, cannot be converted.

3) Map files could be loaded using the standard max bitmap map, so there's no need to activate some sort of special bitmap loader by editing text files.

If you agree with this wish, please go and VOTE for it on the official Autodesk Wishlist. The top voted wishes will be considered for future versions of max.