I decided to look into this a bit further.
The moire effect, and how bad it is, seems to be tied directly to the ballast bed and how high it is, which leads me to believe that the issue revolves around the usage of PBR parallax in a texture.
As a test I turned off parallax, by deleting the height map in the normal texture map for the ballast bed, and the result was that the moire effect completely disappears. Of course this is not an option with my track, which relies on parallax for the 3D ballast effect, and 3D ballast is the whole reason I created this track in the first place. BTW I also noticed that the moire effect does not appear on any of my track which does not have a ballast bed.
I did some checking and the moire effect also appears in some of the various built-in TRS19 Trk Jarrah versions that come with TRS19 as seen in the screenshot image in post #91 above. How bad it appears on those tracks seems to be a function of how pronounced or high the ballast bed is. As my ballast bed is pretty high, and I believe looks much better because of that, the moire effect is more pronounced. I was never happy with the almost non-existent ballast provided by most of the various built-in tracks which came with TRS19. In my opinion they looked very unrealistic for the most part.
At this point I have exhausted all possibilities that I can effect, unless someone out there has further things to suggest?
Bob
Added later note: I did find the following explanation as for why moire appears in PBR, although I am not sure I understand it, nor am absolutely sure it applies here:
"Because mipmap levels are used to store the pre-integrated environment, they can't be used for texture minification, as they ought to. This can causes aliasing or moiré artifacts in high frequency regions or the environment at low roughness and/or distant or small objects. This can also impact performance due to the resulting poor cache access pattern."
The above explanation came from:
https://google.github.io/filament/Filament.html
The moire effect, and how bad it is, seems to be tied directly to the ballast bed and how high it is, which leads me to believe that the issue revolves around the usage of PBR parallax in a texture.
As a test I turned off parallax, by deleting the height map in the normal texture map for the ballast bed, and the result was that the moire effect completely disappears. Of course this is not an option with my track, which relies on parallax for the 3D ballast effect, and 3D ballast is the whole reason I created this track in the first place. BTW I also noticed that the moire effect does not appear on any of my track which does not have a ballast bed.
I did some checking and the moire effect also appears in some of the various built-in TRS19 Trk Jarrah versions that come with TRS19 as seen in the screenshot image in post #91 above. How bad it appears on those tracks seems to be a function of how pronounced or high the ballast bed is. As my ballast bed is pretty high, and I believe looks much better because of that, the moire effect is more pronounced. I was never happy with the almost non-existent ballast provided by most of the various built-in tracks which came with TRS19. In my opinion they looked very unrealistic for the most part.
At this point I have exhausted all possibilities that I can effect, unless someone out there has further things to suggest?
Bob
Added later note: I did find the following explanation as for why moire appears in PBR, although I am not sure I understand it, nor am absolutely sure it applies here:
"Because mipmap levels are used to store the pre-integrated environment, they can't be used for texture minification, as they ought to. This can causes aliasing or moiré artifacts in high frequency regions or the environment at low roughness and/or distant or small objects. This can also impact performance due to the resulting poor cache access pattern."
The above explanation came from:
https://google.github.io/filament/Filament.html
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