Hi.

 

I'm sure this has been discussed any number of times but search keys like 'blurred', 'texture', 'mipmaps' and so on return so many threads that I lose heart...

 

Can someone tell me why some aircraft models have portions that adversely affect the loading of mipped textures, causing FS9 to select the wrong LOD? See the port wing and roundel below. Zooming in then back out resolves the detail but it only remains crisp until I do something like pressing the Alt key.

 

The pic below is a user aircraft so in this particular case mip-mapping isn't really necessary but I do find that having some sparkly AI irritates me and would like if not a solution then at least an understanding of the blurred mip-maps.

 

Thanks all.

 

D

 

 

 

I didn't find a solution to this; instead I converted all AI aircraft textures into the DXT3 format without mips via DXTBmp. I couldn't see a negative effect of this conversion so far while enjoying AI planes with clear textures.

 

(I believe in some dependence on some sceneries, as I had blurred user and AI traffic aircraft textures at certain airports, while the same planes showed up without blurries at other airports. But I had no idea how to investigate this. At some of the affected/affecting airports I found scenery texture files w/o correctly set alpha-channel and fixed them using DXT3fixer, but this brought no or only little improvement.)

Several months ago I got motivated to fix all AI textures to a more stringent standard. I've never used WOAI packages and always created my own AI traffic ensuring every texture was converted to DXT format with alpha. My mission was to fix all my night alpha channel and add mip-maps. I noticed that many of my AI cabin/logo/landing lights were not correct at night, but I just lived with it because it's a huge job to fix. When I got to the FSPainter models and started mip-mapping those textures, I ran into a blurry texture issue. I soon realized that any AI model that uses two or more texture files to cover the model, and if mip-mapped, would cause blurry images when viewed within FS2004. It was at this point that I decided to scrap all my older models (FSpainter, PAI) and upgrade my entire fleet to newer models that only contained a single texture for the model, and a single night texture. I guess if you're AI uses multiple texture files to cover the model, its best not to mip-map those ones. However you may see texture shimmering on those AI that are not mip-mapped.

Thanks chaps.

 

I don't think the problem is related to scenery as it happens wherever I put the aircraft. Also I'm not sure it's strictly a texture problem as it can happen with DXT1 or DXT3.

 

As 3Green suggests, when it happens it's only on aircraft with several texture files. I haven't seen it happen to more than one texture file at a time, never to a plane with one complete texture, and for any particular aircraft it's always the same portion of the model. So Captain Sim's C-130 in the picture above always has a blurred port wing and a crisp starboard wing. Bizarre.

 

If nobody here knows why it happens, perhaps a moderator could move the thread to the aircraft design forum to save doubling the thread.

 

Cheers,

D