Low resolution texture

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I've recently asked help on this forum with the UV unwrapping of a model, and thanks to that help I managed to solve the problem. Sadly however I am now facing another issue which I would like once again to ask help for.

After exporting my model from 3ds Max to Substance Painter I noticed that the textures don't look very defined and kinda low resolution, as you can see in this screenshot:

Here is my UV map in 3ds Max:

Texture check in 3ds Max:

Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?

[Anonymous]

The texture check is not representative of the texture you did in Painter. You need to assign the painter textures and will render correctly with whatever is the original texture resolution.

If you want to see the texture you did in painter in Max display beside the render, then that is another question. You need to use this

Or this

If you want to increase the resolution of the textures in the display go to this and change texture ,aps resolution. It won't affect the render.

[Anonymous]

Hey Karl,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I'm a complete newbie here, all I'm after in simple words is to make that texture look better than it currently does in Substance Painter. I thought the reason it looks so bad is probably due to some mistake I've done with the UV unwrapping, I just don't know what it is.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

If what you asking is why the textures look low res in Painter it could be related to a combination of:

• Resolution of the project:  1k, 2k or 4k can make a bit difference
• Resolution of the textures you assigned in the object in Painter. If they are procedural it should be linked to above.
• The way you did the UVs leaving a lot of unused space. The only way to use more UV space is to create a seam in the middle of the blade and separate it in two. Then pack again. But this could make the seam visible in some circumstances.

[Anonymous]

The document size in Substance Painter is set to 2k. I will try to put a seam in the middle of the blade and split it as you suggested, in order to cover more space. Hopefully it will work fine and the seam in the middle won't show up, otherwise it'd be a bit problematic. I'll update this when it's done.

Once again thank you for the help!

[Anonymous]

Added a seam in the middle of the blade and repacked as you said. The textures look much better than before now in Substance Painter 2, and even though I don't know why, luckily the seam doesn't show at all. Here's a screenshot of the current map:

So that seems to have done the trick, much obliged!

[Anonymous]

That is good enough but keep in mind that the default padding of 3ds max is rather for low res textures. For higher res you could go to 0.007  This will reduce the gap between the islands.

0.0070.02

[Anonymous]

I have no idea how it happened but I had to rearrange my UVs to chance that padding value and now sadly the seam is visible and the texture is no longer uniform across the blade, so this is kind of a nightmare since it was going fine so far.

Is there any way to hide that seam without having to re-attach the blade and lose texel density?

[Anonymous]

If you have changed the UVs after generated the texture in Painter you will get problems.

Painter can in many cases rebuild the textures if the UVs have changed as long you re import the mesh.

https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/UV+Reprojection

If you have changed the UVs before painter you should not have problems. (send a screenshot if you have)

The better padding settings was mostly a hint for future models. If that makes you work easier you could keep the older settings.

[Anonymous]

Well basically I wanted to rework on my textures from scratch, so I figured since I was at it I'd go back to 3ds Max and change that padding before starting on Substance Painter again, just to get a better result. The problem is when I repacked everything in the UV editor the texture wasn't uniform across the whole blade as it was before, instead it is now clearly split as you can see in this screenshot:

If I go into Substance Painter and apply some random material on the mesh, this flaw is pretty evident:

[Anonymous]

Seams in envident places can be a problem. Substance painter can avoid the seams being visible but depends of the material how is done.

Try in your current materials in the specific part is giving you problems to change to tri-planar projection, typically a fill layer.

Notice you could perhaps will need to change the scale or rotation settings of the fill after changing to tri-planar projection to match the same look.

.non tri-planar    tri-planar

[Anonymous]

I tried that and it worked quite nicely on the steel material I applied to the blade, the only issue is that it doesn't work with masks apparently, so when I also have a smart mask on top of my material the seam is slightly visible, although so barely that once you zoom out a bit you can't even see it anymore, I guess that's good enough and I'm happy with it.

Thank you very much once again for the help!