Substance Designer - Baking Textures low resolution issue

ICO · Mar 2021

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.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/j6/sdpdsmfnamrv.jpg

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/w6/vl3bifl68sdd.jpg

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 · Mar 2021

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 · Mar 2021

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 · Mar 2021

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 · Mar 2021

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 · Mar 2021

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 · Mar 2021

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 · Mar 2021

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.

Substance Designer - Baking Textures low resolution issue

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