Why do textures look bad when viewed up close?

E

eddieck

Gawd
Joined
Dec 13, 2009
Messages
1,010
Let's take MW2 as an example (I love using that game as an example). Game looks totally amazing (sure, it's not Crysis, but nothing else is). When you get close to something though, the textures are totally blurred.

The only exceptions I've ever seen are the new Wolfenstein which is half-decent up close or Crysis. I always max out games so that shouldn't be the problem (with the exception of Crysis, for obvious reasons, but even on high settings Crysis looks good up close).
 
The way I understand it is that textures are just pictures applied to the surface of an object. Just like any low resolution picture, when you zoom in close you can see the pixels and it looks like crap.
 
I've always held that I'd rather have a mediocre game engine with incredible textures than some highly advanced tech demo game engine with shitty textures.

Look at the HL2 Cinematic Mod for proof - with not much more than high definition textures and a little lighting mods, it's among the most visually stunning games on the market. And the game engine is six years old!
 
eddieck said:
Let's take MW2 as an example (I love using that game as an example). Game looks totally amazing (sure, it's not Crysis, but nothing else is). When you get close to something though, the textures are totally blurred.

The only exceptions I've ever seen are the new Wolfenstein which is half-decent up close or Crysis. I always max out games so that shouldn't be the problem (with the exception of Crysis, for obvious reasons, but even on high settings Crysis looks good up close).
Click to expand...


crysis looks good up close.. crysis warhead looks like crap..

pretty much shadow.. its the trade off for performance.. put a crap load of detail into the textures so they look good up close and far away.. or make them look good from a distance but horrible upclose.. its why crysis warhead performed better on older cards then crysis did..
 
Udgnim said:
blame consoles
Click to expand...

Agreed... (above explanations are correct, basically). If developers could rely on their target having 512mb or 1gb of VRAM, they would be able to implement much higher-res mipmaps and be more liberal with details :(.
 
Udgnim said:
blame consoles
Click to expand...

Ultimately they are to blame, but still.. those textures are just down sized. They have to have the high resolution originals somewhere, you think they could have saved them as a ultra high option in the PC version.. but no.. We barely get functioning ports on the PC side. :(
 
Why does a photo look so bad through a magnifying glass?
It's all in the resolution of texture they use.
 
Consoles, laziness, whatever. Not enough detail textures being used. As you move closer and closer to a surface, say a wall, a more detailed texture is loaded up. As you get closer still, at some point in a lot of games (to many really) you reach the last texture they decided to use (the good enough point) and it looks like blurry blocky ass when you move any closer.

Other games, on disappointingly rare occasion it seems, will continue to load in detail textures, even with nice bump and sometimes parallax mapping and as far as you go to that surface, it still looks nice and sharp, just as it should. Sure it takes more work, but I must say I really appreciate when they make that extra effort.

A game that comes to mind I recently played is Timeshift, that game had a lot of nice detail texture use, nose to the wall quality at points and some excellent parallax mapping. Not consistent though, sometimes there would be some shitty texture as well. Not an awesome game but a lot of fun. Never played any Crysis games yet, I assume their good as well?

timeshift20091122234820.jpg


timeshift20091122234352.jpg


timeshift20091122234346.jpg


timeshift20091122234124.jpg


timeshift20091122232943.jpg


timeshift20091122232853.jpg
 
Last edited:
It has nothing to do with consoles or laziness...mostly.

Under-detailed textures have been a problem since Quake 1, before decent consoles existed. The problem is that video cards only have so much RAM, game developers only have so much time, and hard drives only have so much space.

A texture is just a picture, whether created entirely from scratch or modified from a photograph. They are mapped onto the surface of a polygon, which itself is a part of the surface of an object or other gameplay element. Textures have resolution, and they can be displayed with no greater detail than the highest resolution in which they are stored. When Quake III was the big thing, textures were generally no greater than 512x512 pixels in size, and usually smaller, like 256x256. When viewed on screen, if that 512x512 texture takes up more than 512 by 512 *screen space* pixels, they will appear blurry.

Today, we have very large textures, upwards of 4096x4096 pixels or more. These days, many textures are not square, so you see a lot of 4096x2048 pixels around. But again, if that texture, or a part of it, is shown on screen with a higher than 1:1 ratio of texture space to screen space, it will appear blurry, regardless of how much detail is actually in the texture, or how large it is.

Some games, like Crysis, Unreal (all of them), Wolfenstein (the newest one), STALKER, and TimeShift shown above, make use of so-called "detail textures." These are simple translucent depth maps which are added to the real textures that make up the surfaces of objects and landscape. When viewed up close, they appear to have a great deal of surface detail. It is an illusion, but an effective one. Textures appear to have more detail, but they do not. The job of the "detail texture" is to deceive your eyes. These days, the detail texture is also rendered as a height-map for bump-mapping, which makes some surfaces look very bumpy and rough (such as above).

Now, the reason they use lower-resolution details can sometimes be attributed to console development. Consoles are more limited in memory, not only in system memory, but in storage. While PC gamers may be happy to sacrifice 50GB of disk space for high-res textures, that option does not exist on consoles, even for consoles with 250GB hard drives. They have to deliver that content first, and console games are almost always limited to a single disc distribution.

Now, most game developers start with very high resolution textures, and scale them down to accommodate the target platform. Conscientious developers, meaning MOST of them, will ship the PC version with higher-resolution textures than the consoles see. That means that, all other consolification issues aside, PC users with super-high res displays, oceans of hard drive space, and larger video memory buffers will usually get a sharper experience on a PC game. Most game developers give the PC the best textures they have, because there is little reason not to. For developers that don't, the ones that ship PS3, X360, and PC games with "identical" texture assets, they are either lazy or obtuse.
 
Last edited:
Sabrewulf... said:
Consoles, laziness, whatever. Not enough detail textures being used. As you move closer and closer to a surface, say a wall, a more detailed texture is loaded up. As you get closer still, at some point in a lot of games (to many really) you reach the last texture they decided to use (the good enough point) and it looks like blurry blocky ass when you move any closer.

Other games, on disappointingly rare occasion it seems, will continue to load in detail textures, even with nice bump and sometimes parallax mapping and as far as you go to that surface, it still looks nice and sharp, just as it should. Sure it takes more work, but I must say I really appreciate when they make that extra effort.

A game that comes to mind I recently played is Timeshift, that game had a lot of nice detail texture use, nose to the wall quality at points and some excellent parallax mapping. Not consistent though, sometimes there would be some shitty texture as well. Not an awesome game but a lot of fun. Never played any Crysis games yet, I assume their good as well?

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/4179/timeshift20091122234820.jpg

ttp://img211.imageshack.us/img211/2843/timeshift20091122234352.jpg

http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/2425/timeshift20091122234346.jpg

http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/1698/timeshift20091122234124.jpg

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/7451/timeshift20091122232943.jpg

http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/1212/timeshift20091122232853.jpg
Click to expand...

Arma 2 (I think, that's the one that came out last fall right?) has some of the beautifully detailed landscapes and environments in a game.

While the tiles and bricks in your images look good, the two of the metal panel / emblem look pretty bad to me. The brown bands above the main panel, that chamfer/edge (can't really tell what it is), it just not textured right and the bolts above that not meant to be seen from that angle. The top of the bolt that's supposed to be protruding from the panel are cut off by the geometry.

Parallax mapping is something that can add a tremendous amount of life to a texture - giving a real sense of depth to a 2D plane. But it's still no substitute for real geometry when viewed at sharp angles.
 
FEAR 2 is an example of how a console game and a PC game should differ in texture quality. A lot of developers use the same textures for all platforms, but I love how the PC version of FEAR 2 got very high quality textures compared to the consoles.

Comparison shots:

PC:
svqclh.jpg


Console:
15d837.jpg
 
FreiDOg said:
Arma 2 (I think, that's the one that came out last fall right?) has some of the beautifully detailed landscapes and environments in a game.

While the tiles and bricks in your images look good, the two of the metal panel / emblem look pretty bad to me. The brown bands above the main panel, that chamfer/edge (can't really tell what it is), it just not textured right and the bolts above that not meant to be seen from that angle. The top of the bolt that's supposed to be protruding from the panel are cut off by the geometry.

Parallax mapping is something that can add a tremendous amount of life to a texture - giving a real sense of depth to a 2D plane. But it's still no substitute for real geometry when viewed at sharp angles.
Click to expand...

Arma 2's texture detail was so inconsistent I found the game unplayable. The grass looked phenomenal but the minute you zoomed into a window with a scope it was like just one big brick.

I started playing Prey last night and while the game generally looks outdated the texture detail actually makes it look better than Arma2
 
Does anyone remember that work done with procedural texturing a while back? I think it was with a bathroom aging rapidly in a video. This isn't exactly what I'm remembering, but it's close: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkTIZ1GldgQ

It'd be great if devs could find ways to tax our processors/GPUs instead of our RAM/HDD to give us lifelike textures for a lot of things. I'm assuming that if it's procedural it could be infinitely detailed as you get closer.
 
eddieck said:
Let's take MW2 as an example (I love using that game as an example). Game looks totally amazing (sure, it's not Crysis, but nothing else is). When you get close to something though, the textures are totally blurred.
Click to expand...

Textures in the game are basically flat images not a great deal different from a jpg image, both are made up of pixels and have a fixed resolution, a pixel is just a unit of area which has a set colour. For examples sake lets say we have a 2048x2048 texture.

When you display this texture in game on a surface, for example a wall, the pixels of the textures become texels (texture pixels) in a sort of virtual space, the 3D rendering engine then maps texels from the texture to pixels on your monitor. (To understand this, think of the monitor as a window and the game world as real objects behind your monitor, if you shoot lines from each pixel straight into the game world then measure what colour of the texel you hit, that becomes the colour of that pixel on your screen)

If you had an exact 2048x2048 screen resolution and you displayed a 2048x2048 texture fullscreen you'd get a 1:1 mapping of texels to pixels on your monitor and the texture would look as crisp as it was originally made.

However when you move towards away from the surface the texture is on the apparant size on the screen alters, if you move closer to that same texture so it grows in size past the resolution of your screen you might only be seeing a small 512x512 section of the texture, however this is mapped to your 2048x2048 screen and you can see this is no longer a 1:1 mapping, in fact it becomes a 16:1 mapping where a square of 16 pixels on your monitor represents 1 texel from the texture, this makes them appear big and blurry.

This is no different from pictures on your computer, most of the time when you open up a website pictures are displayed 1:1 pixels on the image to pixels on your monitor, however if you open up a picture in an editor and keep zooming into that same picture you'll see it becomes pixilated and blurry.

There are several ways you can help ease this problem, first of all you could use a higher resolution texture to begin which is the right size for when it's at it closest to you, quite often you'd need massive resolution textures to accomplish this and this is harder for a graphics card to render.

There are some other tricks you can use, you can essentally have 2 or more texture for a single surface all designed to be viewed at different distances then blur between these textures as you get closer or further away from the surface, this has been possible since the original unreal and voodoo cards (maybe before?)

The big problem at the moment is consoles, consoles have very limited memory to store extra textures and they have a very small amount of graphics processing power to work on those textures, so they have limit the amount they can use in any one scene. A lot of PC games are now either direct ports from consoles or they have been developed as a multiplatform title from the ground up and the PC version has simply inhereted the constraints of the console even though a great many PCs are far more capable.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top