Ugly Textures.

[Fengist]

Ok, I'm just getting started with modelling guys so try no to thrown me off the deep end with fancy acronyms.

Once, just ONCE... I got a texture to look really good. Damned if I know how I did it. I'm exporting my wrap from Wings 3d into a .png file. I'm using Adobe Fireworks to put my textures on that .png (I know it gobs better than photoshop or gimp and I can do almost as much with it as you can with the other two). I'm using njob to make bumpmaps once I get the textures finished.

Questions:

1: With a 1024x1024 texture, how many pixels per inch should I be using.

2: Should I be using a larger size than this?

2: What import settings should I use in Unity? i.e. Filter, aniso, format?

3: Should my bumpmap be of the same quality or less or what?

My problem is, right now, when I start to get close, all of my edges look really blurry but I don't want to create a bunch of memory hogging parts. Where's the fine line between nice looking textures and .mbm file size???

Thanks.

[artwhaley]

I'm not a texture guru... hopefully someone smarter will chime in soon... but until they do, I'll offer what I can here.

1. Pixels per inch in your graphics program doesn't matter at all once it goes in game. If you meant pixels-per-inch of your model... then that's a harder question. The answer is - it depends on the inch. If you get WILDLY different texture densities in a model, it starts to look weird... but within reason, you want more pixel density on the parts of your model that have more detail. So it depends on your part. If there are details like hatches, ridges, flanges, windows, seams of a different material, access panels, rivet strips... you want these to have more texture density than a broad, flat, featureless panel would. It's not a GREAT tutorial, because it was just supposed to show people how I made a part in 30 minutes, but you can watch my youtube video, starting around the 8 minute mark, at

to see how I gave more priority to the detailed parts that people were actually going to see over things like the end of a fuel tank that will be hidden from players for 99% of the flight. Again, not a texturing best practices tutorial... I leave a lot of unused pixels in my rush, but it will give you an idea.

2. It depends on what you're making. I wouldn't use anything bigger than that for a single part... For my landertek mod I'm using one 2048X1024 for everything - about 20 parts... For my dreamchaser replica, I pushed it to 2048x2048, for a complete space plane with about a dozen parts in the same texture. For a single part I try to stick to 512X512 max for most simple stuff. Use what you need to use to make it look good, but keep in mind that KSP has big memory limitations and your mod will get uninstalled if the RAM to Awesome ratio is too high. Frequently, as you can tell from my examples, I'll decide to combine a bunch of parts into one texture so I've got the freedom to stretch out the things that really matter and shrink the things that don't and get the most efficient use of pixel space possible. I'll post those textures tomorrow, if you'd like to take a look at how I'm doing it. The two mods are done very differently, as I'm still learning a lot, but seeing someone else's process may help you develop your own.

3. I don't fiddle with any of the import settings... I import .tga and export mbm... and i just do that because that's what the tutorial I first learned from did. If you ARE using textures with any dimension larger than 1024, you have to tell Unity the new max-size. And take a look at your parts.. in game... both with and without compression on the texture import, to see if you can live with it. I frequently find that it's worth the switch to true color.

4. I would say yes- a blocky bumpmap is worse than no bumpmap at all.. so I usually make them at full quality. That may be wrong- someone may post some great tips tomorrow for getting by with smaller normal maps and we'll both learn from it!

Post some screen shots of the parts, the uv layout, and the texture you're working on! It will help us make suggestions! Get as much advice as you can on making them efficient, but if they don't look good in the end... nobody's going to use them no matter how much or little ram they take up. One final note - many texture artists work at BIG resolutions then downsample. Don't be afraid to make a 4096x4096 photoshop file, then decide later if you want to shrink it to 2048 or 1024 or 512... you can look at all three and make an informed decision... you can always shrink but you can never scale up.

Art

[Camacha]

you can always shrink but you can never scale up.

Do note that shrinking can cause fuzzy details, depending in the specific circumstances. If you have something like a logo on there that is not too big, reducing will not do it much good. You may have to go in and fix that.

[CaptainKipard]

1 & 2. The most often used standard at the moment (if one is used at all) is 256px/m. That's a 256px by 256px texture on a meter square. It's a good compromise between memory usage and texture resolution. You choose your actual size based on these requirements. It doesn't have to be a square either but it's best if the dimensions are a power of 2. So if you can keep the above density and fit your texture on a rectangle instead of a square then do it.

3. I don't know I never had the need to change that.

4. Keep them the same size as your diffuse map. If you need to compromise on texture size then reduce the size of the diffuse map, not the normal map. Normal maps look horrible when scaled down.

The textures in Unity will look worse if you don't view your project with maximum settings. They will also export at a lower resolution if you don't change their max size in Unity. Just select each texture and make sure their max size is at least what the actual dimensions are.

[Fengist]

Here's a screenshot of the problem I'm having...

Supposedly, that's from a 1024x1024 1200dpi png file. I realize if you get close enough you should see some jagged edges on curves but this is bad.

[CaptainKipard]

Yes?

I already said what you have to do.

If it's a problem with the way you're drawing then you should use paths for stroking smooth lines or something. If you're just starting out with textures then it's a waste of time for anyone to give you advice here. You should practice that first.

[Fengist]

Yes?

I already said what you have to do.

If it's a problem with the way you're drawing then you should use paths for stroking smooth lines or something. If you're just starting out with textures then it's a waste of time for anyone to give you advice here. You should practice that first.

1. This is not a freehand drawing with a paintbrush. This was pathing. My UV exported kinda screwy which is why I have a lot of curves in there. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the jagged edges.

2. If by maximum settings you're referring to the max size in import settings, I do check that to make sure they're the same.

3. If I shouldn't come here for advice on modelling and textures for KSP... exactly where should I go to waste someone else's time?

[artwhaley]

Yeah, that doesn't look right, does it. Roughly what percentage of the 1024x1024 square is the window taking up? It doesn't look like it's got the texture density it should, even if you've spread it evenly around the pod. If you view the texture flat in an image program is that line looking good? You can switch the Unity part tools export settings to export the texture as TGA instead of MBM so you can open it up AFTER it comes out of Unity to make sure Unity isn't doing something dumb to it. I'd love to see the texture image posted so we can look at that directly.

To get a better unwrap... and control of your texture density for each part of the model, and just to make it easier to texture... in this situation I'd cut the model at the edges of the windshield, so you can unwrap it separately from the rest of the body, with an island in between... that way if your mesh topology follows the curve you want, then you know that the edge of the windshield will too, and if you want to add more detail later you can. And, of course, you can spend more pixels on the windshield and less on wrapping white around the body tube.

[Fengist]

Yeah, that doesn't look right, does it. Roughly what percentage of the 1024x1024 square is the window taking up? It doesn't look like it's got the texture density it should, even if you've spread it evenly around the pod. If you view the texture flat in an image program is that line looking good? You can switch the Unity part tools export settings to export the texture as TGA instead of MBM so you can open it up AFTER it comes out of Unity to make sure Unity isn't doing something dumb to it. I'd love to see the texture image posted so we can look at that directly.

Thanks Art, below is the PNG I'm using for the windshield. This was just the first texture I was playing with, I didn't get to working on the rest. I did as you suggested and exported as a TGA. It looked the same in Photoshop that it does here.

The unwrap went pretty ugly. I used a 'smoothing' feature of Wings 3D on the top surface and it gave some really, really strange angles. So I unwrapped it as a top, bottom, 2 sides and a rear panel. Which is why there's some strange angles on the finished model. This is just something I'm goofing off with to learn so I wasn't really concerned with how it unwrapped, especially once I saw the quality.

Below this one is a jpg showing the unwrap. As I said, I'm still learning and know I have some weird stuff in the unwrap.

Oh, and this is a stock install of KSP. I left it set on half rez and I'm not using active texture mgt.

- - - Updated - - -

Though I'm a noob at this, I did some playing around and I have a 'guess' as to the problem.

I cranked KSP up to 8x antialiasing and full res and it looked a LOT better. My guess: Slow arcing curves are simply going to produce lots of jagged edges. Anywhere my curves have a tight radius, they don't look bad. Any long curves... look like a set of stairs.

Edited January 5, 2015 by Fengist

[Camacha]

I doubt that anti aliasing should make much of a difference, unless it is some kind of FXAA type affair. Upping the resolution might do a bit more

[CaptainKipard]

I doubt that anti aliasing should make much of a difference, unless it is some kind of FXAA type affair. Upping the resolution might do a bit more

No don't do that. Your pixel density looks already higher than 256px/m. Increasing texture size for a medium-sized part is just insane.

You're not going to get rid of those jagged lines. Give your texture some noise to hide them. You don't see pure colours anywhere on any ships or planes, so why use them on textures?

If I shouldn't come here for advice on modelling and textures for KSP... exactly where should I go to waste someone else's time?

Because you're starting out your problems are bigger than just something that's specific to KSP. Go google some texture tutorials and practice. You're asking how to get smooth lines. That's too basic. Use google.

Edited January 5, 2015 by Cpt. Kipard

[Camacha]

No don't do that. Your pixel density looks already higher than 256px/m. Increasing texture size for a medium-sized part is just insane.

I meant the in-game setting Fengist referred to

[CaptainKipard]

I meant the in-game setting Fengist referred to

Ah. Yes. Actually you should create a copy of the KSP folder somewhere, with no mods (so it loads faster), and use that for development, and max out all the settings there if you can't max them out in your regular installation.

[Nertea]

It probably doesn't help that with a UV map like that, you're going to have some distortion which will accentuate jagged edges (the problem pixels will be spread over more area than you intend). With a surface like that, instead of unwrapping from the top, it will look better if you unwrap each of the two sloping sides separately. I have no idea how to do that in Wings .

Spending lots of time on the unwrap sucks, but it usually pays dividends for low-poly stuff. Particularly with conical shapes.

[nli2work]

My guess: Slow arcing curves are simply going to produce lots of jagged edges. Anywhere my curves have a tight radius, they don't look bad. Any long curves... look like a set of stairs.

you guessed right, what you see is normal. if you want super clean edges between color blocks in your design, best way is split UV patches by color blocks; though that has comes with it's own limitations. Even then, you will still see stair-casing in game depending on your game/videocard FSAA settings

PS. DPI doesn't mean anything unless you are printing. 1 pixel is 1 dot, whether it's 72dpi or 7200 dpi.

[NecroBones]

Yeah, usually if I need a long, clean edge, the thing I'll do to force it to be sharp, is this: Go with separated islands in the UV map, so the polygons on one side of the edge have one color, and the polygons on the other have a different color. As nli2work mentioned, this can still be jagged depending on your antialiasing and graphics settings, but it's a screen-resolution stair-casing, rather than something on the model's surface, meaning you can zoom in and not see blurry pixelation there.

For something like a windshield, I would definitely make it a separate set of polygons in the model (not necessarily a separate mesh object, unless you need to animate it or use a different shader or something), so that the polygon edges can be used to your advantage to get around something like this.

[CaptainKipard]

That's meant to be a windshield? Wouldn't it make more sense to model the windows?

[Fengist]

Supposedly it's a windshield. Again, this is my second day making models and textures so it's still pretty crude stuff. Making the windshield in the model itself is still beyond my ability so I drew it onto the unwrap with the intent of making it stand out with a bumpmap.

One thing I did find that was a big part of the problem is Fireworks itself. Since I'm probably the only person still around using it (I started using it when it was owned by Macromedia so I'm real familiar with it.) I doubt many of you would have know this peculiarity of it. When you load up a png, it sets the resolution at 72 px/in. If you then start drawing, it keeps the resolution pretty low. One thing I did was to bump it up to 1024x1024 at 600 px/inch and once I was done working on it, dropped it back to 72 px. The results looked much better. (or it may be my imagination if nil is right about it being just for print media).

As for tutorials. Wow. I've read and watched a bunch, which is why I'm using Wings for now instead of Blender. I read this tutorial from Beale, it's the first one that's made sense to me, and sorta went from there. Either the tutorials I'm finding have little or no relation to KSP or they're so far over my head and the 'instructor' flies through the process so fast using hotkeys that I can't even begin to follow them.

I am using a stock copy of KSP to do all of this on. I did read about reloading using alt-f12 and that makes things go MUCH faster. But I assumed since the default setting was 1/2 res, that it would be best to develop parts in that setting.

Thank you all for the replies! I shall be studying your suggestions as I learn how to do them.

Edited January 6, 2015 by Fengist

[Camacha]

As for tutorials. Wow. I've read and watched a bunch, which is why I'm using Wings for now instead of Blender. I read this tutorial from Beale, it's the first one that's made sense to me, and sorta went from there. Either the tutorials I'm finding have little or no relation to KSP or they're so far over my head and the 'instructor' flies through the process so fast using hotkeys that I can't even begin to follow them.

Do not limit yourself to KSP specific tutorials, as there are many great Blender assets out there. I followed this miniseries of tutorials and halfway through the first one it just clicked. Though still a beginner, I can now make meaningful parts and edits in Blender.

[artwhaley]

Wings should be just fine, the advantage of using Blender is that there are many more mod makers here using it, so you'll get more specific advice.

I'm confused by what's going on in your graphics program, because the dpi SHOULDN'T affect what you're doing here at all... DPI and resolution are two separate concepts... resolution is how many pixels there are in the image, and it should be all that matters in game graphics. DPI is how many of those pixels to squeeze into each inch of paper if you print the image out on a printer... it shouldn't affect the digital version of the file at all. A 1024X1024 72 dpi file would look the same as a 1024X1024 600dpi file when applied to a ship in the game. Maybe Fireworks is doing some strange hidden rasterizing behind the scenes? If you've found settings that work for you, run with it.

If modelling the geometry of the windshield is beyond you right now, that sounds like a good thing to focus on. Getting a rough shape, then figure out how to subdivide it where you need to add the course details, then subdividing that in the right places to add the fine details IS the process of 3D modelling. I googled "Wings 3D box model a spaceship" and found this tutorial :

He starts with a box and uses extrude, inset and bevel to keep adding and refining geometry. You can either start with a cube or a cylinder and make just about any part in the game by extruding, insetting, moving and scaling faces and points. Focus on these basic skills at first and you'll get there. If you've got a mesh where all the geometry is in the right place (for example, where the windshield meets the body at a clean line with all of the polygons looking neat and organized, and all of the polygons in each 'loop' around the detail mostly the same sort of size and shape) it will be way easier to unwrap and texture it.

I know it seems like the tutorials aren't applicable... but learning to model is learning to model. If you can find anyone modelling cars or machinery or any other hard surface item, the knowledge will easily cross over.

If you do want to try Blender, in my signature is the Open Source Parts Week 2 thread - the first video I posted there is about 30 minutes and it goes from opening Blender the first time, through unwrapping and exporting the part. I move quick, as it's not meant as a basic Blender tutorial, but I THINK I mention every hotkey I use. If you watch a couple of videos about the blender interface first, you should be able to follow all the way through that series and end up with something that works. Again, Blender won't magically make better parts than Wings... but there are more of us using it, so if you post a screenshot of something in Blender, we can very quickly show you how to get through the next step.

Art

Edited January 6, 2015 by artwhaley

[Fengist]

Wings should be just fine, the advantage of using Blender is that there are many more mod makers here using it, so you'll get more specific advice.

Art

Thanks Art,

I will have to move to blender eventually if I keep at this. One things Wings doesn't do at all is animation. But, for modelling a non-animated part quickly, and for those of us utterly befuddled by all the buttons on Blender (I gave up on it yesterday when I accidentally created a bunch of new windows and couldn't figure out how to get rid of them) it's a wonderful program. All of the parts you see there are a single cylinder.

I know it shouldn't affect resolution when you change the print size but it sure seems to. Again, it may be my imagination or I'm doing something else different that works. One thing I found I had to do was to use truecolor in Unity. Without it, it looked horrid.

[Camacha]

I am looking at the screenshots in the Open Source thread and I see a top and bottom node in the scene hierarchy. Is that something you can actually do in Unity?

[artwhaley]

If you're going to eventually move to Blender, better to do it sooner than later. I know it's daunting - I STILL occasionally screw something up in Blender and wind up reverting to a previous save... and I DEFINITELY still find buttons that I wish I'd known about ages ago and wonder why they buried it so deep in the interface. But you'll get there. Learning a different program first can make it more frustrating to switch... I used to use Lightwave 3D a little bit at work, and it's interface made SOOOO much sense to me that it made learning Blender harder because I just wanted it to work the way I was used to. Remembering how to navigate Blender, Unity, and KSP is infuriating enough. I've more than once blasted a test craft into a bizarre orbit because I was trying to hold shift and move the mouse to change my view while in flight in KSP.... and just wound up activating the throttle.

And yes, Camacha, that is by FAR the easiest way to do it, and they've finally got it mostly fixed to work right! (Does anyone know if surface attach nodes work correctly now? I should try that later.) What you do is place an empty gameobject in your unity hierarchy, with the blue arrow pointing out (as in, towards the part that will attach to it in the editor) and then in the config file instead of defining a node with that long string of numbers you add something like :

NODE

{

name = top

transform = nodeTop // Or whatever your transform name is.

size = 1 // Will always be 0 until fixed.

method = FIXED_JOINT // will always be FIXED_JOINT until fixed.

}

where nodeTop is the name of the gameobject. There are a couple of other things to know about it... the last thing I read said that the top and bottom stack nodes always need to be the last two nodes you configure in the file, if you've got more than two, and there was an issue with using gameobjects to define the attach node for surface mount parts... but I haven't tried that since .90 came out, so it may be better now too. It's WAY easier, for me at least, to position the node in Unity visually than to keep reloading the config file as you try to dial it in numerically the old fashioned way.

[CaptainKipard]

size = 1 // Will always be 0 until fixed.

It's already been fixed. You can use any size.

method = FIXED_JOINT // will always be FIXED_JOINT until fixed.

There's an attempt to fix HINGE_JOINT here. I don't think it's working yet, but maybe someone can help out.

[Beale]

I suspect the problem is you have unwrapped the UV-map with a normal projection, but maybe for this an unfolding projection is better. That can sometimes be the cause of distortion like this.

It's at the point in Wings 3D where you are pulling out your UV spaces, you can right click one, an re-project it as an unfold.

Again, this is just a guess what is causing weirdness.

Personally, I will say what others have said: It is better to model the windshield in 3D, it will let you have much smaller textures overall if you are not painting everything on.

example:

3D window, it is quite large.

But, on the texture, the window is really small. Just stretch.

You see we don't have to worry about "painting within the lines".

Like you could have your 3D model window, and stretch a tiny black square texture over it, to get the same amount of detail, and there would be zero distortion.

Argh, this is so frustrating, I really don't have the vocabulary to try explain what I want to say here, I hope this makes any sense

Edited January 9, 2015 by Beale