Substance Designer - Baking Textures low resolution issue

ICO

Hello friends,

 I'm creating some berries and inside SD, I'm transferring texture from mesh at 4k and Anti-Aliasing set to Subsampling 8x8.



Can someone please help me understand why are my textures so pixelated? I can barely understand what I am look at despite 4k resolution. Things finally start getting a bit more clearer at 8k, but such resolution is just unreasonable.

poopipe

That's not really enough information to go on

What are you transferring from? 
What resolution is the input stuff at? 
Is there anything in your graph that reduces resolution?
Etc..

gnoop

Substance Designer has a few limitations.

For example if you shift / directional warp / offset some pixels   SD  doesn't have any easy way to shift/ move anything   to exactly  say 20 pixels  left   like a normal image editor .   

It can probably with some pixel processor   math using floor function maybe  or something.  I tried but never succeed with that.

So with default nodes every time you move some pixels they move to say 20,3 pixels and get a little bit blurrier .   Actually not a little bit  comparing to Photoshop  , rather quite a bit .       Same reason why crop nodes are such a pain in the a... there.

A workaround is to work always at least twice bigger resolution and  downscale into targret size  in the end. 

Also  take notice of "primary" input ( with a gray dot) it's where next node take the resolution  from previous one  to avoid situation when you  downscale and then upscale back something .

it happens often with their material nodes  where 'diffuse color" is primary and 

you use "base color".       I suggest to re-set "Height" as primary input everywhere

ps. Also when you scale  some alpha image in SD it adds a typical  integer math image issue.   All half transparent pixels  get their alpha multiplication with non linear gamma  adding a little bit of darker halo .   if you scale small things to few pixels only it also may add to visible resolution drop.  

That's why my guess they did  splatter node 32-bit.

ICO

Thank you for your suggestion, gnoop. I'll keep that in mind for sure, but this is really not what I'm doing here.

There is no graph.
I am not making a substance material, I am baking textures.
Inserted a plane -> right click -> Bake model information, loaded the high poly mesh I've done in Blender and baked maps onto the plane.

In the Transferred Texture from Mesh baker I specified the berry texture I have and that's pretty much it.

gnoop

Oh, sorry .   missed it somehow       As of baking color texture it always gets a bit blurrier than original.    And I always do it in at least twice bigger resolution than necessary.   But have not  done  it in SD for pretty a while  

if it's a flat plane you bake into  it's  generally better to just render an ortho  camera  with depth. roughness and normal AOV .   Blender renders  normal AOV as -1 to +1  range  but it's easy to fix with *0,5+ 0,5 in compositer and normalize node for depth.

poopipe

You might have some success changing the filtering mode and as gnoop says baking higher and downsampling will generally get you a better result.

Otherwise it's really down to how much UV space is available. Packing the flowers tighter/scaling them up will get you more resolution

ICO

I tried with changing the filtering mode - no success. I'll experiment with packing the branches differently, but since there are also leaves and stems, there isn't much more space left for the berries.

ICO

Thanks for the suggestions people, I couldn't manage to increase the area my bushes take on the plane. I did however got slightly better results by baking at 8k and downsampling to 4k, which is not ideal, but if anyone can think of a better way of doing it - lemme know.