Improving Texture Quality

[NagaRulez]

How do you improve texture quality? Not by hand, I mean.

 

[jopi]

you mean ingame?

If so, you could try to upscale the texture (e.g. from 256x256 to 512x512) but you have to keep in mind some things.

• the texture size has to be a power of 2 (2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512...)
• you have to keep the initial texture geometry (e.g. when scaling up a 128x256 texture the next bigger is only 256x512)
• be aware that simpy scaling up the texture causes a quality loss in the texture itself, and I don't know if the texture improvement is noticable ingame or even makes it worse (so maybe you have to put your hands on the up scaled texture and make some fixes to correct the quality loss)
• Magos' Model Editor has problems loading textures which are bigger than 512x256, but they still work ingame

 

[chr2]

you mean ingame?

If so, you could try to upscale the texture (e.g. from 256x256 to 512x512) but you have to keep in mind some things.

• the texture size has to be a power of 2 (2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512...)
• you have to keep the initial texture geometry (e.g. when scaling up a 128x256 texture the next bigger is only 256x512)
• be aware that simpy scaling up the texture causes a quality loss in the texture itself, and I don't know if the texture improvement is noticable ingame or even makes it worse (so maybe you have to put your hands on the up scaled texture and make some fixes to correct the quality loss)
• Magos' Model Editor has problems loading textures which are bigger than 512x256, but they still work ingame

Simply scaling a texture up wouldn't improve the texture quality - best case scenario, it would look exactly the same, but have a much larger filesize, worst case (and probably more likely) it would look worse, either because of scaling or conversion issues, and would, again, have a much larger filesize.

You could try adding a sharpen filter to the texture after you scaled it up (and maybe try experimenting with stuff like increasing the contrast or playing with the color levels in other ways), but I still don't think it would really look better (probably not enough to justify the increase in filesize anyway).

 

[jopi]

^This, was what I wanted to say with my 3rd point

 

[Dr Super Good]

you have to keep the initial texture geometry (e.g. when scaling up a 128x256 texture the next bigger is only 256x512)

I thought this only applied to special texture files (eg terrain) as models wrapped them using 0.0-1.0 texture coordinate space. As such scaling a 128x256 to 256x256 should still look fine on the model with exception that you can have polarized high frequency information.

be aware that simpy scaling up the texture causes a quality loss in the texture itself, and I don't know if the texture improvement is noticable ingame or even makes it worse (so maybe you have to put your hands on the up scaled texture and make some fixes to correct the quality loss)

Depends on scaling algorithm used. In best case there is no visual change in quality at all (quad filtering). In worst case you can introduce distortions and unrealistic high frequency noise (nearest pixel scaling). Artificial sharpness (more realistic high frequency information) can be added with some filters however this still cannot add true high frequency detail.