Model surface causing textures to blur?

[Dave Morgan 63]

Hi.

 

I posted a similar question in the FS9 forum a short while ago but drew a blank so I thought I'd come where people are sure to know about such stuff...

 

I've been spending time dealing with various bugs in my aircraft, including adding mips where necessary and noticed that some aircraft can display blurred textures (port wing & roundel below), apparently after I've added mipmaps. On any specific aircraft it's always the same part that gets blurred. It happens with mipped DXT1, DXT3 and 16 bit (565) textures and probably others too, and to all mipped liveries for that part of that aircraft so I assume it's something to do with the model rather than the texture. Zooming in then back out resolves the detail but it only remains crisp until I do something like pressing the Alt key. Can anyone satisfy my curiosity and tell what causes this to happen?

 

The pic below is a user aircraft so in this particular case it doesn't really matter but I do find that having some sparkly AI irritates me, more so because I don't understand why it's happening.

 

 

 

My thanks to anyone who can explain it in primary school language.

D

[tgibson 11]

As I understand it, GMAX (etc.) sets a "size" attribute to each texture material when it creates the MDL file. Usually it gets it right and the image is sharp. But sometimes (especially when you use the same material to texture both small AND large objects), GMAX will use the size attribute of the small object when it should be using the large object instead. When this happens, FS will select a lower mipmap and it will look blurry. The usual cure for this is to remove mipmaps from the texture, which will indeed cure it, but can cause shimmering of that part at sharp angles in FS.

 

You can fix this for FS9 scenery MDL files (using MDL Tweaker), but I know of no fix for anything else.

 

Hope this helps,

[edetroit 814]

Hello Dave, I used image tool for years to convert my textures. But sometimes when creating mipmaps with it I get the blurries.

 

When I created the same mips using DXTbmp (by Martin Wright) the blurries disappear....I do not know why.

 

I still use image tool but I get the feeling DXTbmp is the better image converter.

[Dave Morgan 63]

Hi again.

 

Thank you both for your answers. Removing the mipmaps for that particular texture was the solution I'd been using; the problem is rare enough that I'm happy to live with it, especially now that I know why it's happening.

 

I've been using DXTbmp to bring my texture files to some sort of standard. Laziness is creeping in and I was thinking of using ConvImX as a batch tool but if DXTbmp gives the better result I'll stick with doing things the long way.

 

Best regards,

Dave

[tgibson 11]

AFAIK Convim and DXTBmp use the same conversion process (both by Martin Wright). I assume that in the above poster's case DXTBmp was removing the mipmaps while Imagetool was not.

[3Green 72]

Any AI model or user aircraft that uses two or more texture files to cover the model, and if mip-mapped, could cause blurry images when viewed within FS2004. For AI aircraft if you want to use mip-maps, always use a model that only has a single texture for the model, and a single night texture. If the model contains more then one texture file to cover the model (ex some FSPainter models aka A332 etc), its best not to mip-map those ones.

 

RJ

[edetroit 814]

RJ is correct about single textures for AI....... however I would like to add my strange experiences with image tool and DXTbmp.

 

FSpainters A330's mipped with image tool = definite blurries was vastly improved by using DXTbmp (as can be seen in pic below)

 

Fuselage texture of my IL-90TD-90VD was blurred after converting with image tool (no mips)... but not with DXTbmp.