How to get small details into your textures/normals

Necrodark

Been playing god of war and was inspired to make a project. i dont have much done right now, im just starting to texture one of the main assets and I dicided I want to get to the bottom of a problem i've been having for a while.

My textures always seem really low res, i can never get any small height details to come out well and pretty much any minute detail i try to add comes out looking blurry and pixelated. (also my normal bakes never come out right, weird edges) 
I've done the baking in 4k working in 2k and switching to 4k before export but it still doesnt look right.

for example i want to add this small carved detail

As you can see, apart from the textures being blurry, the alpha stamps dont show enough detail and just come out looking weird.
If you guys have any ideas or pointers please feel free to leave a comment.

also this is what i mean with the weir edges in the normal bake

Obscura

Show an example of what are you trying to achieve exactly. But in general, large assets shouldn't be using unique texture because of the resolution limitations. Wrapping even a 4k texture on a 10m asset will never look high res. You could either split the mesh up into multiple materials, or consider tiling materials with masks and / or in engine decals.

Zack Maxwell

I think the issue is as @Obscura mentioned; the size of the asset. Texel density is more important than just resolution.
If you have the same texture resolution on both a very large asset and a very small one, the large one will turn out blurry due to low texel density.
This is circumvented by using multiple materials on large assets.

Necrodark

Zack Maxwell said:

I think the issue is as @Obscura mentioned; the size of the asset. Texel density is more important than just resolution.
If you have the same texture resolution on both a very large asset and a very small one, the large one will turn out blurry due to low texel density.
This is circumvented by using multiple materials on large assets.

Yeah i knew that would be a problem but for some reason i thought it would make sense for an environment, I guess i'm going to have to use 2 materials. Thanks alot for the feedback, you too @Obscura. do you guys have any tips for the edge artifacting in the normal bake (seen in the second image)?

Obscura

There could be 2 reasons. 1, no dilation. 2, rotated uvs. Its a good practice to uv straight shapes horizontally or vertically. The reason is that pixels are like small squares. Now imagine that you lay a straight uv piece diagonally on top of those squares. So there will be a lot of half squares on the edge of the uv piece. Aligning such pieces on an axis makes them aligned with the pixels, so you get much better anti aliasing. This is not always applicable of course, but you should do it where its possible. It even worth a few more cuts sometimes.

Necrodark

Obscura said:

There could be 2 reasons. 1, no dilation. 2, rotated uvs. Its a good practice to uv straight shapes horizontally or vertically. The reason is that pixels are like small squares. Now imagine that you lay a straight uv piece diagonally on top of those squares. So there will be a lot of half squares on the edge of the uv piece. Aligning such pieces on an axis makes them aligned with the pixels, so you get much better anti aliasing. This is not always applicable of course, but you should do it where its possible. It even worth a few more cuts sometimes.

That Actually makes alot of sense haha, i always start off trying to layout all the uvs vertically or horizontally but it leaves so much empty uv space. I guess i just need to put more time into manually laying out UVs, i usually just  auto-layout them in maya.

Obscura

Like I said you could add some extra seams here and there. Nowadays, the most of people use 3d painting applications, so you can easily paint across seams. A few extra uv seams won't make a huge difference in performance. Especially because you are already kinda forced to use a bunch of seams because of the smoothing groups and how they work with normal mapping. So if you can't really lay long pieces out nicely on your uvmap, you can just cut them into smaller pieces that fits better. Of course I'm not saying to cut everything into many pieces, but sometimes it can give you better results.