I'm trying to get my textures to look as crisp as they do in the Unreal engine . It seems that Unreal's mostly just displaying larger texture sizes than I currently am.

1. Is Epic doing something tricky that I simply can't compare with in 3DGS??

2. I've been trying to stick to 256x256 textures because I understand that lots of cards can't play larger textures. Is that really such a big deal--is there a workaround?

3. To use really large textures on level geometry, I need to scale them down a ton, but I remember reading somewhere that scaling bitmaps down more than 50% is bad. Is that true and is there a workaround?

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1. Is Epic doing something tricky that I simply can't compare with in 3DGS??

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yes
there extra work goin in unreal one thing seem to notice seems to be some antalias makes it look very smooth no jaggey
most 3dgs shot have jaggey edge all over the light is much better as well etc etc

no matter what unreal always look better
this might send ppl into arms but simply true
build similiar room in each engine extract some unreal texture and use them
in both engine and use same lights and unreals will look better

smother cleaner just better render

they use a simple trick called area based texturing.

this simply means if you have a house that needs a wall texture, a part for the wall to celing section and a part for the ground to wall section you dont create three different textures but you use one larer textured splitted into 3 areas.
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top area for the wall-roof connection
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the standard wall texture that is repeatable


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area of the ground to wall texture
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now if your house is 3 or more floors high you can simply use the lower 4th of the texture for the ground near areas, the top 4th for the roof areas and the middle can be placed tileable into all 3 or more walls of the different floors.

Its like unwraping models made out of wed geometry.


another point is detail mapping for the textures as well as bumpmapping...this adds lots of detail to the textures.

Others then that they dont use any tricks.
And you can use 512/512 textures ourdays...its pretty common. I know hardly any card that cant diplay it...sure not the fastest version of a texture but a lot more detailed.

hope that helps

Great comments. Thanks! So it's ok to scale down a texture on level geometry as much as I want? I can't remember why I thought you weren't supposed to scale them down less than 0.5.

the more you scale the textures down the more shadow pixels will be calculated on it (as a result the shadows will look better)...but this costs shadow map memory and speed.

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build similiar room in each engine extract some unreal texture and use them in both engine and use same lights and unreals will look better

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that is only for that in unreal the detail map is creata automatik for the editor.

therefore
build similiar room in each engine extract some unreal texture and use them
in both engine and use same lights and use the THE SAME DETAIL MAP and you observed less differences

can use 512x512 whit not problem

Does GS implement detail maps very well? I read this . . .

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detail_size
To be removed from the documentation. For new applications we
recommend to use a material effect for detail textures.

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. . . and it made me think that detail maps don't really work yet in GS. Do they? That would be great news!

Well, try this Shader from the wiki for detail maps. It works nice when your detail maps dont have to hard contrasts.