Eyes get milky when rendered at a distance[Solved] (internal)

I honestly do this all the time… I’m a newbie and I had a problem that nagged me for a long time, but while preparing a post, I figured out how to fix it. And I hope others can benefit from what I found. The problem was that my models eyes would get be crisp when zoomed in close, but milky when rendered at a distance. I tried lots of combinations of anti-aliasing and oversampling but couldn’t come up with a render setting that I was happy with for keeping a crisp edge on the eye’s irises. Here I’ve set up a comparison of the view port and render, and at the bottom, inserted the fixed render. The difference is just a pixel or two, but at that zoom, to my eye, it’s a real big difference.


The problem, I discovered, was at a different point in the pipeline than I had assumed. As I stripped out things like anti-aliasing, shadows and ray tracing I discovered the problem only got worse. It was actually in the sampling of the texture. Here’s the deal, I’m using a DAZ style eye texture map that has an alpha transparency for the cornea layer of the eye. By moving the highlighted faces to their own, fully transparent material, it forces the render engine to disregard the texture completely, for faces which need to be completely transparent.


Any input is appreciated…

Paola eye texture courtesy of Age of Armour-3D ( http://www.ageofarmour.com/3d/free/skin-textures.html )