Disabling mipmapping

[Col. Faulkner 0]

Is there a way to disable mipmapping on a particular texture,

or at least to reduce it? I'm making a rifle target addon with

an image on it, but the default mipmapping makes the image

go blurry and out of focus very quickly as you walk away

from it. You can observe the same effect with any of the BIS

roadsigns. I'd like it if I could make the image stay sharp[er]

out to 100 BIS metres or so.

[Synide 0]

i doubt whether you'll be able to 'disable' it... although, saying that I can't remember if any of the supported texture formats in ArmA don't have mipmaps... senility...

but you might be able to lessen the effects by specifying a default texture in the .rvmat which of course points to your _co.tga/paa and alter the filter on this texture from the default 'Anisotropic'.

Try each of the alternatives, point, linear & trilinear to find the best alternative.

Currently the 'Anisotropic' will be trying to compensate for the viewing angle to the signage and maybe introducing a more noticeable blurring.

If none of these filters provide a solution then next you could try 'tricking' the engine with some multi-pass texture blending... maybe... dunno, haven't tried.

Also, you are using a DXT5 _co texture right? Check in TexView2 to see.

Also, bare in mind that image quality is affected by alot of factors... some of which can be altered through game settings (anti-aliasing etc.) and some todo with your gpu hardware and some todo with graphics drivers... so you should take esp. current game graphics settings into account when analysing possible flaws of in-game textures etc.

[Col. Faulkner 0]

Thanks for the reply. I'll try out some of those things once

I've understood them better.

[MehMan 0]

I was wondering about the same, but mainly for aircraft cockpits and vehicle interiors. It sucks if you're playing on low texture quality and you cannot read any of the dials, but you're playing without the speed display and fuel display.

[Synide 0]

Hmmm ok,

the faces on your rifle target - you should have a texture applied to it... also, you should have a material.rvmat file associated with it.

When you open the text version of the .rvmat with the O2PE Material Editor you can specify a 'Default Texture'.

Point this at your rifletarget.tga/paa as well.

For the filtering for this texture use 'Linear' and also change the filtering of your other stages to 'Linear' as well.

Does this make a difference?

If not then try 'TriLinear'.

I do not know what the alogrithm for determining the changing of mipmaps in this engine. I presume it is based on a number of factors including the LOD resolutions you have in your model.

What resolutions do you have?

@MehMan... that'll most probably be the default 'Ansiotropic' texture filtering at work... in DirectX it tries to compensate for the angle the polygon faces are being viewed from... which can create blurring.

Try first a 'linear' filter for that texture in your .rvmat - Linear filtering should be trying to use a weighted average between the 2 closest mipmaps.

[rocket 9]

What if you save the textures without any mipmaps? I'm pretty sure that you can, when making a paa file.

[Synide 0]

yes, i mentioned that on the first reply... maybe it's DXT1 but I can't remember and can't be arsed looking it up atm...

Edit: Nah, it's not DXT1...

Ok, you might try this...

I couldn't get TexView2 NOT to write out any mips...

But, with Keygety's .paa plugin for Photoshop I could specify creating 1 (one) mipmap.

When I then closed the file from within Photoshop and then tried to re-open it I got the familiar 'Discard Mipmaps?' and I selected 'No'.

When it loaded there was only the 1 (one) mipmap level.

Whether then using this .paa for your sign will work I'm not sure...

[MehMan 0]

I wouldn't count on it, I think I had problems with ArmA at one time when I did that, but it might have been something else. Worth a try.