How do they do those incredibly crisp textures ?
greentooth
So i've been unpacking Anno 1404 textures because i'm impressed by this game graphics.
The textures are not all even, but most of them are little jewels imo. So much little details.
Here's a little sample (cropped but 100% res) :
In your opinion what is the workflow to achieve so crisp textures ?
Not a single blurry part.
Worked in x2 or x4 then resized with nearest neighbor ?
Painted like pixel art ? But I know some parts are baked from highpoly, if not everything.
Sharpen filter a lot ?
Probably the dxt compression adds a bit of sharpening too.
I don't even get how they could make those 1 pixel thick circles look so good.
gah, killer work.
The textures are not all even, but most of them are little jewels imo. So much little details.
Here's a little sample (cropped but 100% res) :
In your opinion what is the workflow to achieve so crisp textures ?
Not a single blurry part.
Worked in x2 or x4 then resized with nearest neighbor ?
Painted like pixel art ? But I know some parts are baked from highpoly, if not everything.
Sharpen filter a lot ?
Probably the dxt compression adds a bit of sharpening too.
I don't even get how they could make those 1 pixel thick circles look so good.
gah, killer work.
Replies
Also...texture filtering in engine tends to blur textures to make them look smoother. If you can, try using point filtering instead of bilinear or whatever.
Pixels will be more noticable in your texture...but it will give you a crisper look.
I know from UDK, that mip maps has been in a pain in my arse, in the beginning, kept importing my 'cool' highres textures and then got this blurry crap when I looked at it in the engine.
Another thing that i do is to work a lot with masks in photoshop to paint in dust or rust or whatever. And when i'm done and happy i sharpen the mask (not the texture layer itself).
10k x 10k textures? What the hell. That's way overkill. The usual methodology is to use 2x the size you plan on having your final maps be.
And my vote goes for painting in actual rez. The downsizing thing really only makes your mistakes harder to spot. But it doesn't magically add details or sharpness.
I think the notion comes from baking a normal map (or whatever map) at four-times the resolution, and then scaling it down a step later to get an anti-aliasing effect going. I'm not sure if even that's useful though, cause the amount of extra time you'll spend baking a 2048 compared to a 1024 should be about the same as just baking a 1024 with anti-aliasing turned on.
*hands ceebee the joke-glasses* Come on, man, it's not that early in the morning that you couldn't see that I was joking.
If I'm working at lower (sub 2048 res) I tend to paint double size and then sharpen the scaled down version. Painting bigger lets you do the small details easier and scaling down helps to soften out rough brush strokes etc, you do need to counter the shrinking with some sort of sharpening filter though or it tends to come out looking fuzzy and shite.
You have to sacrifice some time for AO bakes but I reckon you make it back from not having to be so anal with your painting anyway
When you bake an highpoly, i don't see how you could have that control and be sure that the window border will not be baked on 2 pixels and be slightly blurry.
Hard to say for the normal map, it's probably not as clean as the diffuse.
But yeah, i do think they use massively the smart sharpen.
I'm not sure these are baked. Looks more like generated from a heightmap.
But you can also clean up straight lines by hand in PS if they are slightly messy after a bake.