Crisp Pixels

Hello, I would like to get some very crisp pixels as textures in UE4. The problem is I am dealing with low resolutions (UVs in segments of as low as 16x16 pixels of a 256x256 atlas), and UE blurs the heck out of the textures. In Unity, this is as simple as selecting “Point” for the “Filter Mode” in the texture import settings.

I have tried what I believed to be the analog in UE, setting the filter to “Nearest”. I have also tried disabling mip maps. Neither of these have a visible effect on the texture crispness.

What can I do about this?

Here is a screenshot for reference. Please ignore the size and light differences. The most obvious example of crisp pixels can be seen in the ground in the Unity example. I would like to achieve that with UE4.
jeDFnpn.png

  • Make sure that you have AA checked in your postprocess.
  • In engine scalability options set your mode to epic.

Best Regards

Actually that would only reduce aliasing, while minderaser is looking to intentionally get an aliased/pixelated look.

In regards to the original question: You indeed found the right setting, the nearest neighbor filter setting should give you the results you are after. (Mipmapping will also have an effect, but only when zoomed out enough that one texel in the texture is smaller then one pixel on your screen, so in this case no effect should be expected)

Regarding the filter setting not working: Can you post your texture settings? As this should “just work”, so clearly something strange is going on.

That’s the TXAA filtering out the edges. It works by reducing Aliasing over multiple frames. You’ll have to simply turn Anti-Aliasing off if you want super-sharp pixel-like edges.

Navigate to Edit > Project Settings > Rendering > Default Postprocessing Settings. You can switch AA to ‘none’ there.

2d3074bbc44a2ac46b9d80b42b884ad97aca5d4a.jpeg

Something strange was indeed going on. I restarted the editor and the problem corrected itself. I am thinking after changing texture settings UE4 does not refresh the texture, so nothing is changed until it reloads it fresh. D’oh.

Thank you, but I already had AA set to none.

Some options to try:

  1. You can over-sharpen your textures in photoshop before import, to compensate.
  2. You can try importing the texture at one size higher than you will use, and set mip Gen Settings to Sharpen10 (or lower), and set the LOD Bias to 1 to use the sharpened mip as the base. Note this can sometimes make for really splotchy mip maps down the chain.
  3. You can try searching the engine inis or cfgs to look for any anisotropic/triliner/bilinear filtering is happening and set them to lower values.

Glad to hear that that fixed it for you, though normally you should get instant feedback from a change to the filter setting in both the texture viewer as well as any material that uses the texture, so something was definitely wrong. You might want to report it as a bug if you can reproduce it.

Did you do this and restart the editor afterwards? Some rendering settings require a restart. All textures will update as you change their settings in the editor.