Help with High-Resolution Maps

[Chip360 0]

Hi there,

I am looking for advice. As some of you may know I am texturing the Strykers, anyway, I am just wondering HOW THE HECK TO PROPERLY MAKE A HIGH-RESOLUTION TEXTURE! I have bumped up my .Psd to 4096x2048 and the quality is fantabulous, but upon conversion from my .tga to .paa with tex view or Paa Tool it is Greatly reduced. I get strange deformations in the texture, and frankly, it looks like crap.

Is there absolutely no way to save a High-res texture that looks pretty much the same as the .psd or .tga you are converting from?

example:

Fuel tank:

Original, taken from 4096x2048 Texture

Degredation due to conversion to .Paa

Isn't there a file type I can convert to that the engine will read that will not lose quality? I am not looking for CRYSIS quality here or anything, but come on, we aren't in the OFP days anymore...

Any and all help is greatly appreciated, if I can get this working it will be worth it : )

*Also posted on the Armaholic Forums*

[Linker Split 0]

what i always do is drag-drop the TGA into pal2PacE. there's no evaluable degradation

[Chip360 0]

Can you give mine a look? I tried what you said but, Idk, just have a look at my texture:

High-Res Textures Wip

.Tga Format; 4096x2048; 32-Bit; 32 MB

(Also included is the Original .Psd for the particular texture Im working with, incase you wanted to try to save into other formats)

Keep in mind, that the texture I refer to above is a texture for the entire stryker, that gas can is merely a sample from it (zoomed in) to demonstrate the change in quality from the .psd format to .paa.

Some files do not have such a decline in quality, .tga's for one do not, but they are large and rather raw images, hardly good for games. I rested upon the thought of using a .Bmp instead which are used for High-res Textures in many games but unfotunately ArmA does not support this.

[ArmaVidz 0]

Have you tried saving as .PNG then converting to .PAA using TexView2?

[Chip360 0]

Thanks for you replies guys, I am really glad I have people helping me through this, I'm about to pull my hair out lol,

ArmAVidz: I just now tried saving as .PNG and converting to .PAA and I recieved the same result as above (No need to post a new comparison, it looks the same as above).

Edit: Upon giving this more thought I realized- there seems to be a lot less decline in quality when you take a 1024x512 resolution texture and convert it to a 1024x512 .paa, so maybe, instead of using one two large main textures for the entire stryker (including tires and the gas tank and all sorts of other details) I should just re-Uv map the model and use a seperate texture for each section, like divide it up so the quality loss is less, but this will be very time consuming and probably difficult for myself, so maybe we can solve this thing without having to take that type of action quite yet.

[t_d 47]

There is a texture size limit of 2048x2048 in ArmA afaik. So paa format probably cant handle this size correctly. if you use a 2048x2048 instead of 4096x1024 you should have no problems but the same detail.

[Chip360 0]

Thank you for this, I will stop fiddling with 3072 and 4096 textures then.

However, one thing to note, for some reason, I Still have artifacting, that little sign on the gas tank is totally artifacting and becoming distorted, I really dont see what the problem is there, do you know what may be causing that?

[CameronMcDonald 146]

By artifacting do you mean it's turning into that mushy mess (in the "after" pic) you posted over at ArmAholic, or is it causing something else? Just asking before I get too involved.

[Dingmatt 0]

Can some on explain the 4096x4096 bug to me? i'm running textures of this size with not problem (as far as i know).

[t_d 47]

Some older graphic cards cant process textures bigger than 2048x2048 afaik.

[shinRaiden 0]

Some older graphic cards cant process textures bigger than 2048x2048 afaik.

ATI decided to cut corners to try and make their cards faster. Also part of the reason why ATI's can't support multi-output display spanning. Part of DX10 was a management decision mandating that the device mfgr's stick to the script and implement the DX spec as-is, instead of making private modifications.

[Chip360 0]

Hmm. okay, for everyone to know

By artifacting I meant the anomoly seen in that sign above, the sign is crisp, then conversion and it is weird as heck, as you can see in the after photo. Also, I think the overall quality is reduced too (look next to the sign) (but thats not what I meant as artifact) (and if thats the wrong word im silly, my bad)

I dont know about the graphics card thing, does someone want to take the texture (psd or tga) above who have a good card and try to convert for me?

[CameronMcDonald 146]

I'll have a go.

EDIT - Results are in. I get some distortion, by no means as bad as what you get, however, it's noticeable around the bottom left edge of the diamond, and is quite the gay. What I'd recommend, perhaps, is working on the texture in 2048x1024 and trying to keep it as sharp as you can - this may means you'll have to redo the PSD at that size to keep the sharpness factor. Soz mate, I wish things were different. Perhaps those with generation 9 cards could take a look at it, though I doubt there'd be much difference over what my 8800GTX could produce.

I wouldn't be too concerned about the loss of quality there, I believe that the BIS Strykers look pretty good, and any improvement on them is certainly good in my book.

EDIT #2 - Remember that having good specular and normal maps is also half the battle won. For example, you don't need to worry so much about the degradation of your "FUEL" writing on the fuel tank if you can make a normal map which shows the indent.

[Dingmatt 0]

that explains why a few ati cards have problems with the addons and crash out.

[Chip360 0]

Hmm, I could have sworn I still saw those freaky sign problems at 2048, its really strange...

I guess this will be what I do though.