PerpetualRevision said

"Where I disagree is that 4k diffuse textures are wasted. For one thing, Firefly won't blur them out if (a) you turn off image filtering on all image maps (except for hair, which looks better with Quality filtering); and (b) you set the Post Filter Type to sinc and Post Filter Size to 2 or 3 in your Firefly render settings. Also, with computer monitors getting increasingly high-res, final renders should be larger (~3k or higher) or else they'll seem tiny and blurry in just a few years. I regularly do final renders at 4400 × 2475 pixels b/c I like to be able to see all the details and b/c it no longer takes ages to render that large. (My average for final renders is around 15 minutes for direct light.)"

The way I look at it is, it's better to have high res textures and resize them down if need be, than have textures that need to be sized up. If someone is incapable of opening an image editor and changing an image size? If it's too much of an inconvenience? Imagine how inconvenient it would be if you had to create your textures and models from scratch? I know, a shocking proposition...

Actually, I'd say that crisp or none is best. Repeating or tiling textures that tend to have a Moiré pattern effect, higher res fabrics for instance, are best served by the slight anti aliasing that Quality texture filtering setting provides. For GI/INDIRECT lighting, seems like no texture filtering is best with hair. Or so I've read recommended in more than one instance. The Crisp setting was probably introduced when it was found that the anti aliasing happening with the existing texture filtering choices of fast and quality were causing seams to appear at uv margins on many textures. Mostly on those that had an insufficient bleed zone of pixels (which I recommend is between 6 and 10 pixels) at the boundaries of each shell or island.

Shader, bump, and displacement detail is better served by a lower min shading rate. I use 0.10 in render settings (default is 0.20) and batch modify every actor's rate via a script (individual min shading rate in properties) to match. Simply changing the global rate in render settings isn't enough, each actor must have a corresponding value setting if expected to be handled at that rate. In this way it's possible to have lower shading rates on things that would require it, and higher on less important things.

I think super high poly counts on models that work just as well with half the polys is some thing I still see a lot. Especially on toon figures that aren't going to be morphed as much as a "realistic" human figure that's expected to be many things to many people. And we have Subdivision and HD morphs now, but there's a dual edged sword factor with this (at this time) but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

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