Marcoor FS Maps too Small

aaráribel caađo

I did my first render with the Marcoor FS. The texturing is brilliant—clearly a lot of care went into making this right. However, when I went to render a cinematic-style widescreen shot, the fact that the entire body occupies one UV map showed up: the render has this weird half-tone-looking effect that I've seen with other renders when the texture maps aren't large enough. Earlier, I did modify the diffuse map slightly by "painting over" the logo (I'm using it as a stolen pirate ship). I save the file as an uncompressed JPG (e.g., 100% quality), so I don't think that should have made an impact. However, while doing that, I was surprised to see that the part of the file with the FS text on it—a chunk of the ship that's almost as big as a DAZ figure, scale-wise, was very small. So I feel confident the problem is that the ship's body wasn't broken into multiple UV sets and everything must fit on one 4k map. That would be fine if the ship weren't used in close ups, but if you want to render out a DAZ character near the ship at a reasonable size (say 800-1000 px tall), the texture breaks up as show. I'd urge all PAs to make sure the texture maps they're creating are large enough to match up in scale to a standard DAZ figure. I know there's some compromise with having a bunch of huge maps and render RAM, but I'd rather have to make some adjustments than not have the resources to do a render with a product I've purchased.

Oso3D

Yeah, with a lot of this stuff I've relied on retexturing with either map-less stuff (like my procedural stuff), other more specialized mapped stuff (like Mec4D's paint/metal shaders), or, in 3DL, procedural grunge (like Stonemason's Dirt shaders).

 

Richard Haseltine

I'm not sure what you are seeing, but it isn't likely to be due to texture size. Are you sure the model isn't using tiling maps?

As an aside, all jpgs are compressed and lossy - saving at 100% applies the minimum compression and data loss, but it does apply some. If you want a lossless save you must use a different format.

Oso3D

Are you rendering in Iray? What texture compression settings are you using?

 

Valandar

Richard Haseltine said:

I'm not sure what you are seeing, but it isn't likely to be due to texture size. Are you sure the model isn't using tiling maps?

As an aside, all jpgs are compressed and lossy - saving at 100% applies the minimum compression and data loss, but it does apply some. If you want a lossless save you must use a different format.

If the filtering settings aren't set right, a high ratio of texture pixel to screen area CAN cause this, Richard. I've seen it and fixed it myself.

Richard Haseltine

Valandar said:

Richard Haseltine said:

I'm not sure what you are seeing, but it isn't likely to be due to texture size. Are you sure the model isn't using tiling maps?

As an aside, all jpgs are compressed and lossy - saving at 100% applies the minimum compression and data loss, but it does apply some. If you want a lossless save you must use a different format.

If the filtering settings aren't set right, a high ratio of texture pixel to screen area CAN cause this, Richard. I've seen it and fixed it myself.

Interesting - is there a general fix that could be applied after the texturen exists, as here?

aaráribel caađo

I've seen it with textures I haven't manipulated when the camera is too close to the model, although usually not in areas that are so large. Also, I use a lot of textures I've saved out as jpegs without encountering this. I'm pretty sure the root cause is when the texture map has fewer pixels in the area showing in the render than the area rendered (e.g., if the part of map showing in the render is 100px tall, but appears in the render at 150px tall—with these maps, I think it might be more like a 2:1 increase in pixel size due to the entire ship body getting one map). I'm rendering in Iray. However, I didn't do anything to the filter settings.

aaráribel caađo

timmins.william said:

Yeah, with a lot of this stuff I've relied on retexturing with either map-less stuff (like my procedural stuff), other more specialized mapped stuff (like Mec4D's paint/metal shaders), or, in 3DL, procedural grunge (like Stonemason's Dirt shaders).

 

Given how great the texturing is on this, it would be a huge shame to retexture it with procedurals or more generic shaders. I really want to emphasize how good the texturing is. The only problem is (perhaps due to my not modifying the filtering settings, which I don't know anything about) is that it renders weird at large sizes. As long as I can get the close up renders right, I'll eagerly buy any new Marcoor space ships and start investing in the entire Marcoor series.

mtl1

Hmm. Can this be somewhat fixed by scaling the texture to, say, 8k then scaling the UV to match? It seems like scaling outside of DAZ would prevent some of that texture breakdown in the screenshot above...

For the record though, I own the Marcoor products and I haven't seen this effect -- at least for the indoor sets.

mtl1

Okay, I've included some tests: Loaded Marcoor FG, loaded the textures into PSP and resized the ship_2 maps to 200% using Smart Resize, then Bicubic-Sharp. Compare this to the regular maps and there's a *slight* improvement in the hull quality...