How does one get the mapping to be sharp. If I take a 640 x 480 pict put it in Director an animate, its sharp. The same pict mapped on a block in carrar with a camera looking straight on (doesnt make a difference which camera, with good lighting) the result when I render is not as sharp as it should be. Any suggestions?

This is one of the better options I have found in Carrara. In the texture window, see the three options for the bitmap? It defaults to sampled, the most blurry one. Try equal area table or gaussian(sp?) options. This is especilly good for bitmaps with regular pattern features (i.e windows on a skyscraper). It keeps the bitmap from forming the op-art like wave patterning and keeps it crisp. Also a larger bit map will be less blurry than a smaller one. Also try "best" oversampling in the render. vhigh

Hey! Does anyone know if there's an analogous setting in RayDream? That sounds like it might be the solution to a problem I was having about 4 months ago which I never solved.... Dex now scratches his head and wants to leave work early to go home and play with RDS again.... - Dex

The "similar" features in RDS is the "Better (but slower) sampling" in the shader editor for a texture map. However, I get the opposite effect in Carrara as the default "sampling" seems to work better. The "Gaussian" filter is useless as there is no control over the blurring of the pixels, much better to use the filters in a photo editor. It is essential to make sure that your proprtions are 1 to 1 to avoid pixel distortion, I.E., an 8 x 10 plane with a 576 x 720 ppi @ 72 dpi image.