Alphas blurry on mesh!
Hi everyone! I've been working on my radio and I've been trying to figure out whats wrong with my textures. When I go to texture my mesh with alphas (also happens with custom made alphas) it comes out clearly when the alpha is scaled pretty big but when I scale it down quite a bit, it becomes really blurry. I've tried baking my textures out into 4k, scaling my mesh, and making the UV bigger for the areas I need more detail in.
I've been stuck on this for a couple of days and it's really bugging me so any help is appreciated :)
Replies
you don't have enough resolution for the small things
personally I'd apply them in a second uv set or as decals
hmm okay.
What about the mesh with the alpha on it?
I've tried making the UV for that mesh as big as I can for more resolution but it still seems to make the alpha blurry.
The texture pixels are bigger than the pixels in the alpha so it is forced to average out the alpha when you stamp it on and that gives you the blurry look.
There is no way you're going to get sharp edges on that text unless it has significantly higher texel density.
If you're at 4k there and have about 16 pixels (at best) of height available you'd need 16k texture to get anything halfway decent .
16k textures are not okay so this is where you need to use a different approach.
First, remove all the text etc from your painter file, set the resolution to something sensible (like 1 or 2 k) and export the textures.
Second. make a texture with all the text on at a resolution that looks nice and sharp, map some planes to that sheet and position them as decals in Maya or whatever.
Then either
1: apply a masked material to the planes so they behave like decals.
2: move the plane UVs into a second channel and create a material that composites the text texture (using the second UV channel) over your main (painter) textures.
IMO everything you do in SPainter is always a bit blurrier than same in Photoshop or for example Affinity Photo. My guess it's because Photoshop does much smarter pixel interpolation and sharpening and operates with pixels themselves rather than just UV space projection . Especially when you scale down some bitmap.
I try to work in twice of target resolution and it's still not as crisp and clear, pixel to pixel as in Psh.
That's a comparison I did with scaling down my grass render Photoshop vs Substance Designer a year or two ago. In Painter its even blurrier actually. My guess it's a price for interactivity.
My guess it's why some people still prefer Photoshop and such .
I once tried to do a bunch of bitmap move and scale sbsars that operates with pixel integers rather than 0-1 UV floating range. It worked in Designer but I hadn't enough patience to go through all the export to Painter quirks. Looked like it still re-rasterize everything you move .
painter won't do pixel perfect placement because you're projecting every stroke in 3d space, not editing the texture directly - if you want pixel perfect placement you use something that edits pixels directly (eg. photoshop)
that's not the problem here at all though - if you tried to place antialiased text that size in photoshop it would look like crap because there aren't enough pixels to represent it
Tried what you mentioned (applying texture with text on it) and it worked like a charm. Thanks you so much :)