I was texturing a 4 floor building (quite large for a player) for a PC game in Substance Painter. But, no matter what I do, the texture of the walls seem good from distance and UGLY, blurry when you approach the wall. The texture is 2K (Unreal packed, of course).
I was considering whether to detach each wall of the building, so that each can have a 2K texture (4 walls with 4 materials). But, I’m worried about performance, texture streaming, draw calls and etc.
Any advice, guys?
You need to author a more complex material to retain a high resolution at different distances. I’d take a look at some of the starter materials. The basic idea is to have multiple textures repeating at different scales (you can search for terms like macro and micro variation, etc).
Texture size should be relative to screen size, for something like a building you can use tiled materials rather than unique textures.
For up close, you can use distance based Detail normals and textures.
To sharpen your materials in Engine you can use r.tonemapper.sharpen 1
For stuff like that you need to use tiled textures as a base–so if it’s a brick wall then you have a small brick texture that you can tile so that you can get high detail without a large texture map. After that you can use techniques like masks and vertex painting and decals to add unique weathering and variations.