As you can see the small squares on the side seems to smear. Any idea why this happens?

Set it to bicubic in the texture part for all channels that that decal appears on in the material editor for that texture. Make sure your not resizing the texture like 1 to 1 works best. Big textures work better than small ones and if it really is hard to get it to stop doing that then try turning off analaising on that texture or making a new bigger texture ( this is difficult because it may be UV mapped.) Oh and if it's a jpg picture of the decal that may be it right there as in it's over compressed. Bmp works best. Or any lossless image format. You'd have to try to fix it and it's very difficult. I found a pluggin for photoshop finally for the jpg squares. Photoshop 7 may have a similar pluggin built right in but image doctor for Alien Skin works really well on such over compressed images.

You also have lines in your water. You may want to search on this forum here for it's fix. I think it's in the FAQ part to tell you the truth also.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1155888#2

get rid of the lines in water

I don't think the problem is the texture. It's 2048x2048 in size and compressed using highest jpg quality settings witch means that you can zoom in quite a lot before you even can see the effects of the compression. Also if you look at the top deck there is no 'smearing'. It only happens at the sides and if one checks close it goes all the way back except for the place where it meet the flatened sphere with the shaded white smoke material' that I used for the water foam. The effect get's worse the higher quality I use. It's hardly visable in Preview mode, gets bad in Final and really bad in brodcastmode. However.. It seems as it get's a lot better with the bicubic setting butt I have to make a bigger test render to be sure. But if so, I can for sure not understand how the 'none Oversampling' I used can make something 'smear' like that? Thank's for the line in the water tip, it's something that has anoyed me for long.

None over sampling is sort of like a gif works. it's a number line color system. This pixesl here is this color and that's it. Scale just magnifies the error. Simple like if the center pixel is black and surounded by white and you resize it to 4 X the size you'll have 4 perfect black pixels in the center surounded by white pixels. Seems to be the way to go ay? Problem is your not rendering a flat cube and circle shapes get munched with such a system. Like you must be able to see the difference of a gif and jpg image. That's sort of the difference. But it's worse in a way because the image is being scaled. Take a big gif make it smaller with out oversampeling then make it bigger again without oversampling. That is sort of what is happening to your boat texture, Then on the antiailasing pass comes it just looks at the original and no blending happens.

Keep in mind this most important fact. You're adding pixels or taking pixels away from the original image to make it fit on the boat. You can decide how that's done. This is taken from photoshop help file Um the first setting is the same as Vue's None oversampeling.

Nearest Neighbor (Jagged) for the fast but less precise method. This method is recommended for use with illustrations containing non-anti-aliased edges, to preserve hard edges and produce a smaller file. However, this method can result in jagged effects, which become apparent when distorting or scaling an image or performing multiple manipulations on a selection.
(Photoshop) Bilinear for a medium-quality method.
Bicubic (Smooth) for the slow but more precise method, resulting in the smoothest tonal gradations.

Bicubic takes blocks depending on the program but it's usually at least 9 pixles square and then with that decides how that center pixel will look at a different scale. it's much more accurate. It's the one to use but the trade off is speed, not much though. Resampeling happens really fast. .0001's of a second even for really huge images. Um that above sample way up there you would get a blend from white to gray to black to gray to white.

Now explain to me why you would render in the higher quality setting when you sampling the textures at the lowest quality setting?

Make sence now?
Btw your texture size is fine and is not the problem. Oh and add to this it's a jpg and even though you claim that you cannot see the damage till you look at it really large. None oversampeling changes all that because of the this pixel right here is going to remain this color reguardless of size. So it shows up then easily. Take the texture and sharpen it about 4 times and you see the same effect without having to render it. Jpg kills sharp edges depending on the system used to compress it. Jpgs are bad news and are hard to work with the best of times. Even at 100% they still goof up and progressive (better) and standard optimized (bad News), None (best) add to the crud. Most programs you can set that though and they use standard optimized by defalt because it gives the smallest files. Lossy type images compresions should be banned in the art world. There a pain. There is now jp2 or there called jpg2000 and there lossless. nice stuff, That is what we should all be using.
But bmps are lossless too they all use some sort of compression. Bmp's use RLE same as zips use.

There is no way to fix a jpg. Damage is done. You can sort of repair it a bit but the damage is done. It's like trying to make a poster with a stamp sized original. Good for the web but poor for rendering perfectly.

Well the damage is only done in the jpg saved version ;). I never save original texures in jpg format. The use of jpg is a compromise to get smaller files. I will try a different file format and see if it has to do with the jpg as I'm still not convinced about that as I have used HQ jpgs for long without any problems. ;) Also the fact that it don't smear when it's in contact with the flattened sphere point's more to the fact that the sphere might use another alias algoritm that also effect the texture it's inside it than a jpg problem in witch case I would expect the same problems inside the sphere. Some easy Tests will answer this. Thanks for explaining about the antialias. What helped most was that I realised that the setting for the different tabs in the material was connected to the later alias. I thought it was an separate setting having to do with how scaling of a texture should be handled. This together with the recommendations for most 3D apps to not smooth any textures in advance but in stead leave that to the anti alias process made me do a wrong choise on the settings.

It don't matter how your save you finished renders, I prefer bmp because sometimes there is a off chance you'll want to do a bit of post process work and there is no undo with jpg. It's finished once it's jpg. I never use applications to save jpgs anyway because there is usually no contol or if there is very little control. I use jpg smartsaver where you have total control. Now I'm taking about textures. Avoid jpg textures and if you must use them well at least try to use "none" type as in the subsampling when you create them. I used to have a map that explained how the jpg subsampeling works. It explains also why you get artifacts in a way because of how they extrapolate about 16 pixels down to a single formula number.

Here i'll post a picture of jpg subsampling for you, I'm not going to type this all over again. This is going to goof up probably cause they use the names 422 and 411 those are the same as progressive and optimized. Anyway they're bad news if you then use Vues lowest sample rate to read them on such a blocky type texture. In a way it's doing exactly like it is suppose to do. It's reading it properly and it shows. So don't use that one. The other even worse thing compressing a jpg again with a different jpg setting. ie: You render a jpg texture then save that picture as your art with a different jpg setting. Big problems because instead of there being one white say there is going to be hundreds. This is pure death for images. A jpg can only distroy such a image. It's like incripting a incripted file. Risky and might not get good results.

perfect example. I did some art this year where about 16 people worked on it before me saving it each step as a new jpg file. All mixed up different settings. It was unusable. I had to download all the original arts and take it just when they submitted there piece. It was a jpg compression grave yard. It was never ment to work like that.

Some jpg compressors allow you to turn off that extra compression. Those two progressive (better) and standard optimized(bad News) are the ones that give you that funny none sharp edges. Artifacts we'll call it. Thats hard to undo In photoshop you have to set remove artfacts to 100% to get rid of the ones from standard optimized.

jpg's die on images just like the one you have there. Sharp contrast,lots of color changes. that's where you generate the maximum artifacts. You would never notice it if it was a texture of a rock.

I know the instructions in the Vue book about bicubic are confusing but bycubic usually gives best results.Now that might not always be the case because of complex effects like transparency and alpha and bumps. I try to set them all the same but it's what ever works best for that particular texture.

This is almost jpg 101.............

HellBorn, just for a test try to render the mapped object on a dry ground, without water. Do you get almost smeer?

Thank's for the in depth info Mighty Pete. I know about the problem with resaving jpgs. I always save my project files in uncompressed formats. I only convert to jpg when I want to reduce size such in cases when I want to send something over the net or for viewing on the web. If it's the fact that I used a jpg here that is the source for my problems then I have lerned something new and might avoid using them unless i really have to. The best demonstration of jpg problems in my opinion is to just try and save a page with black text on white bottom. You must look really hard for something that looks more ugly. ;) Gebe: I will do some different test rendes anyway so I will include one without the water.

"The best demonstration of jpg problems in my opinion is to just try and save a page with black text on white bottom. You must look really hard for something that looks more ugly. ;)" Exactly. Ban the jpgs on the source at least.It's a poor excuse for a original art source. I do a lot of art and I'm constanly running into jpg problems because I'm in the middle of the assembly line or more toward the end and other people in front of me do not understand what the hell there doing. Jpg's are good for the web for browsers but that's where it ends. Art need to be lossless. See I think your texture is just like the black and white text. It's the same sort of blocky texture only it's color. Jpg cannot do that type of image. Gif would be better or 24 bit bmp being the best. TGA are just fine to and also support RLE better than bmps. Oh and the new XnView compresses 32 bit tga files now with RLE on all the channels even the 8 bit alpha channel. Times have changed and we got JPG2000 now to we just need more companies like E-On to support that file format.

"See I think your texture is just like the black and white text. It's the same sort of blocky texture only it's color. Jpg cannot do that type of image"

I think your wrong here. I have used jpgs a lot without any problems at all. But, I am aware of it's limitations and know the no no's. It also makes a big difference witch application is used for creating the jpgs.

I have now made some renders and I think they support my opinion on that my problem has nothing to do with it being a jpg image.

It's the sphere with the Shaded white smoke that is the problem. If someone have any ideas on how I best create the water foam without getting this problem i would greatfully recive such suggestions. ;)

Oh the dreaded hidden blurry water / smoke sphere. Post process.... Ha ha That's going to be difficult. There is lots of unexpected wierdness that happens in Vue's fake volumetric materials. There is a whole bunch of pictures here already posted of wierd artifacts. Like Blow your mind stuff green and blue colors that or not in the scene. If you must render it... Try this... Load that fountian that comes with vue. Check out the water. I used that once on a different project by changing that material to the milk one and getting rid of lots of the spheres. I also made the spray part the same idea with a terrain. The other thing to is it may have nothing to do with the boat texture it may be the material you used. Turn off shadows on it and few other channels that could transmit color onto a different object.

Thank's I will try those ideas. As I was planning to do a little animation I don't think postwork is a god ide as it would be to much work and thats the reason for trying the volumetric materials. However, for a still image doing postwork wold probably be a lot faster and look a lot better than trying to do it with volumetric materials. Also several layers with semi transparent 'image planes' (dont remeber what they are called in vue) with a 'foamy' paint job could do it. Actually that could work in an animation to but then the foam would have to be animated and that would probably be more work than I have the time to put into it. Now i'm gonna go and check out that fountain.....