Hi, I have imported an HDRI image, made a material, checked unlit and two sided. Plugged the material into a Sphere which is larger than the skylight. Changed the mip gen settings to no mipmaps, changed the texture group to Skybox. My image is really blurry, please find attached screenshot. This always happens, I cannot get clear image. Any suggestions?
What resolution is it?
If I remember correctly, cubemaps have a max resolution of 2048x2048 for each of the 6 sides due to GPU texture size limitations.
Might be a silly question but what is the actual resolution of this texture you’re importing?
(Oops, didnt see that was already asked :P)
The original 360 degree panoramic file is JPEG and is 25492 x 12746. I took it into Photoshop and reduced size to 1024 x 1024, then saved as EXR (HDRI File). Imported into Ue4. Brought in Sphere from Engine Content, Made material, placed HDRI image into material. I think it is a setting in Unreal because the imported HDRI is not blurry?
I don’t know if I’m doing this all wrong, I am a complete beginner at this…
Hi, I adjusted size of image in Photoshop to 2K, imported HDRi into Ue4. Please see below, any suggestions, it doenst look that great? Are there any settings I am not doing right, maybe in Photoshop?
If I’m understanding you correctly you are down scaling it to 1024x1024 or 2048x2048? When you look at it in the content browser, it’s not going to look blurry because its about the same resolution as a standard HD monitor at that point. However, when you map it onto a sphere, and apply it in game, it’s of course going to become blurry because your entire screen is being filled up by less than a quarter of the image, effectively making it a sub 512x512 or 256x256 image. If that makes sense.
You need to import the image at as high resolution as you can if you want to use it as an environment backdrop. The standard engine limit is 4096x4096 but you can do some tweaking to some engine config files and have up to 8192x8192 textures I think, which is what I always do.
If you want to use the HDRI image for image based lighting inside of your skylight, it will downsample the HDRI image to whatever your specified Cubemap Resolution is: This is only for lighting information and reflection purposes. You can get away with anywhere from 256-1024 in my opinion (If doing Archviz, bump it up to 1024 especially if you have chrome materials or lots of glass)
However, reading through your post again and coming across the fact that you are converting this jpg to an HDRI, you should be aware that just by doing that you aren’t creating a proper HDRI image, as the dynamic range of a jpg is much less than an HDRI, and it wont fill in the gaps simply by converting.
I really recommend using these skies in your archviz projects. They are free for commercial work. http://noemotionhdrs.net/ If you need a specific city backdrop in them you can do some photoshop do some horizon cut and pasting to make a nice composite image.
Let me know if youve got any more questions and/or if some of this doesn’t make sense.
for the 4096x4096 what should the DPI be?
Hi, thanks for the assistance. The problem is I’m working with a drone photographer who is taking the 360 degree panoramic shots. We are using specific shots so I cant use Skies you recommended. The drone photographer sends me the file in JPeg, then I take into photoshop, resize it and export as EXR for ue4. Is there any way you could let me know your process, what steps to take. What file format should I ask from the drone photographer? Not JPEG? The other options are:
- TIFF
- PSD
- PSB
5 MOV
And in order for me to use the HDRI as cubemap in Skylight, what type of file must it be?
Your help is very much appreciated, thanks.
Try setting the texture to “no mipmaps”…
HI, I have already got that setting. We seem to be getting loads of Anti-Aliasing issues when using VR, especially on the Panorama Skybox. We are using Forward Rendering MSAA.
Hey sorry, I kind of lost track of this thread.
If you just want to use it as a backdrop all you need to do is save it as a .TGA or anything Unreal can import. If you also want to use it as a cubemap in the skylight then you need to import it as a .EXR or .HDRI, but all I’m saying is it might not get the same super high quality image based lighting that you might get from a sky that has been professionally photographed at multiple exposures, like the ones I linked earlier. Based on your original post, it seems the jpegs that your photographer gives you are high enough resolution (you mentioned something around 25000 x 12500), so all you need to do is downsize that to 8192x8192, and import it. If you need even higher resolution after that, you will need to look at splitting your image up into tiles, and using some kind of custom skybox mesh, but an 8K skydome is usually good enough.
Great, thanks very much for your assistance, much appreciated.
Hello, @VaSSiLi
Could you, please, explain it in more details, show an example or point at a tutorial of how to make it? Because in my case 8K for me isn’t enough.
Thanks in advance!