Blurry texture issues [solved - check mipmaps count! ]

[HawkGer]

Hey there! I encountered a strange behaviour today when creating some objects. Maybe someone here can explain it to me.
http://www.vinummusik.de/Media/BlurrytexturesTM.jpg

The left rock is made with an ingame material (=standard texture use) and the rock on the right side uses a custom material (= custom texture use). When looking at the custom texture from above you can't see any differences to the standard texture. But looking at it from a different angle like in the bottom part of the picture makes the texture look really blurry. This is not the case with the standard texture.

If it is any help this is the meshparam for the custom texture:
<Material Name="StoneCustom" Model="TDSN" BaseTexture="../../RPG_Textures/Default/Rock2" PhysicsId="Stone"/>

Maybe this is just another TM bug, or I am doing something wrong. Hope someone can help.

[meuh21]

I think it's because one face is horizontal and the other one is vertical. Some textures are only "well" in vertical (like cliff in Valley) and some other are only "well" in horizontal (for ex : some concrete textures in Canyon).

I'm afraid there's no solution to solve this...

[HawkGer]

Yeah, I know about those textures. But these ones are normal textures.
I only changed the camera angle in this example, there was nothing changed about the block rotation

[Fix]

It seems this is a filtering issue (happens on all 3D engines), not a data/texture/items problem.
When a polygon is small on screen, the graphic card will draw a lower mip map of the texture on it. It happen when faces are far or, seen from a very low angle.
Anisotropic filtering will increase sharpness of faces seen at this angle (walls or floors).

[HawkGer]

But those two blocks are at the same distance and same angle to the camera. Why would the right block with custom textgure get super blurry and the left one looks okay? Your explanation doesn't really address that issue I would say.

[Fix]

This is an interesting question.
That would mean that the texture has been duplicated somehow for the item, and doesn't have the same filtering settings than the one of the environment/mod.
Have you customised the material lib or is it a standard environment material plug?? I've seen some people do that hack.

[HawkGer]

I just did some more experimenting, this bug really is weird. I found out that the blurriness only doesn't occur when using Nadeo textures. So when taking a texture from the TMStadium.zip and making it a custom texture it is totally fine. But even just by resaving the Nadeo texture you suddenly get blurry texturing ingame.

Take a look at this:
http://www.vinummusik.de/Trackmania2/Fo ... ugRoad.jpg

I took the RoadD.dds texture from the game files and put it on objects as custom texture (top left) and as mod texture (top right).
Then I simply resaved the file in Photoshop and looked ingame again. The result is in the lower part.

The two .dds files are the same, there is no difference between them that I can see:
http://www.vinummusik.de/Trackmania2/Fo ... ectBug.jpg

So...do Nadeo textures have some hidden antiblur protection or what?

@Fix: I didn't change anything in the material lib, it's just a standard material.

[Electron]

You can compare the file header of both DDS files using my tool GbxDump.

Do you also used a Normal and Specular map for your Items?

Have you tried to let the NadeoImporter create the DDS files from TGA source images?

[HawkGer]

Oh god thanks, that was perfect Electron!
Turns out custom textures need to have 11 mipmaps or they don't work properly.
Funny thing is: I suspected this before and counted the mipmaps of the Nadeo textures...but only counted 10 mipmaps because I thought the original texture didn't count as a mipmap ^^
Always such a pain in the a** these mipmaps

Couldn't have solved this without you guys, thanks a lot!

Edit: for 2048x2048 textures it is 12 mipmaps, for 4kx4k textures 13 mipmaps etc.

[Fix]

How can photoshop forget one mipmap O_O
Anyway, nice find, and I'm happy it's not a bug :p