R
Rabbit, White
Guest
Well I did some digging and figured out how to both have mip maps and not have the blurry textures (really something I should've thought of a while back but oh well 
). The thing that promted me to do this really is that I noticed that vanilla textures look great but they also clearly use mip maps, yet when I create mip maps, the textures end up being very blurry obviously, so I was doing something wrong. In the moment of real "Duh!" I realized that I should try other filters and settings for generating mip maps. These are the results I got. (Keep in mind this is done in photoshop using NVidia's DDS plugin, if you're using gimp to create DDS files then you'll probably have these options as well, just displayed/organized differently.)
The two main things I looked at (to improve the textures) were the filter that's used to generate the mip levels (point, cubic, gaussian, etc.) and the sharpening method. There are many options there for both, in many cases the differences are barely visible so I don't know if the settings I chose are the best possible but they're much better than the default ones.
So basically I just did a comparison of three differently generated textures - one w/o mip maps, one with the default settings, which are cubic filter and no sharpening, and one with what I think are much better settings, and they are Catrom filter and soft sharpening. Here are the results...
As you can see, at maximum zoom level there's not much difference, as all units use the 0 mip level, i.e. the actual texture.
As the camera backs up and new mip levels are starting to get used, the differences becomes visible. Already the default mip method causes textures to become slightly blurry. You can also see that the texture w/o mip maps is slightly sharper (and IMO better looking) than the one with the better mip map settings.
This is more or less the default zoom level of the game. As you can see the default mip map settings produce a horribly blurry and muddy picture. This is why seZ started this thread and why he prefers no mip maps. Of course the real interesting part here is the comparison between no mip maps and better mip maps. At first glance the no mip maps texture looks sharper and possibly better, but if you look closer you will notice that in fact, that texture is becoming slightly pixelated, or aliased. And in fact, it is much more obvious in game when the camera moves around, and those little jaggies start shifting around. At this zoom level however, that is still hardly noticable.
(I did not resize this screenshot, just cut away unused space) Depending on your screen you might, or might not, be able to tell that the no mip map texture has become even more aliased, and at this point, in game you will probably start noticing a flickering effect with that texture. Which I personally find really annoying. The better mip map texture however, still manages to look fairly sharp and it has no flickering at all.
So, as far as I'm concerned I'm definitely switching all my textures to mip maps using the catrom filter with soft sharpening.
). The thing that promted me to do this really is that I noticed that vanilla textures look great but they also clearly use mip maps, yet when I create mip maps, the textures end up being very blurry obviously, so I was doing something wrong. In the moment of real "Duh!" I realized that I should try other filters and settings for generating mip maps. These are the results I got. (Keep in mind this is done in photoshop using NVidia's DDS plugin, if you're using gimp to create DDS files then you'll probably have these options as well, just displayed/organized differently.)The two main things I looked at (to improve the textures) were the filter that's used to generate the mip levels (point, cubic, gaussian, etc.) and the sharpening method. There are many options there for both, in many cases the differences are barely visible so I don't know if the settings I chose are the best possible but they're much better than the default ones.
So basically I just did a comparison of three differently generated textures - one w/o mip maps, one with the default settings, which are cubic filter and no sharpening, and one with what I think are much better settings, and they are Catrom filter and soft sharpening. Here are the results...
As you can see, at maximum zoom level there's not much difference, as all units use the 0 mip level, i.e. the actual texture.
As the camera backs up and new mip levels are starting to get used, the differences becomes visible. Already the default mip method causes textures to become slightly blurry. You can also see that the texture w/o mip maps is slightly sharper (and IMO better looking) than the one with the better mip map settings.
This is more or less the default zoom level of the game. As you can see the default mip map settings produce a horribly blurry and muddy picture. This is why seZ started this thread and why he prefers no mip maps
. Of course the real interesting part here is the comparison between no mip maps and better mip maps. At first glance the no mip maps texture looks sharper and possibly better, but if you look closer you will notice that in fact, that texture is becoming slightly pixelated, or aliased. And in fact, it is much more obvious in game when the camera moves around, and those little jaggies start shifting around. At this zoom level however, that is still hardly noticable.
(I did not resize this screenshot, just cut away unused space) Depending on your screen you might, or might not, be able to tell that the no mip map texture has become even more aliased, and at this point, in game you will probably start noticing a flickering effect with that texture. Which I personally find really annoying. The better mip map texture however, still manages to look fairly sharp and it has no flickering at all.
So, as far as I'm concerned I'm definitely switching all my textures to mip maps using the catrom filter with soft sharpening.
