HDR on sky-sphere has low resolution

Development Rendering
1

Hello alltogether,

So I tried to use an HDR from NoEmotion (NoEmotion HDRs) on my skysphere. The resolution of the texture is 150007500px. But when I apply it on the sphere it looks like the photo was shot with a potato. I checked the HDR in photoshop and zoomed 100% into it, to see the detail, which is very good. Here’s what it looks like on my machine, using UE 4.21.1:

1624×876 178 KB

Now how I set up the texture (No MipMaps):

1872×1325 192 KB

And how I set up the material:

1879×928 468 KB

1878×927 473 KB

I don’t know why it’s doing that and would like to know what I could do to solve my problem with the texture, or setup. Any help is appreciated.

Edit: In the texture in unreal it says resource-size 12MB, the HDR was over 311MB in size, I don’t know if that helps, but thats that.

2

Hi!

If I’m not wrong HDRs are imported as cubemaps, which are limited to a max res of 2048 in-game!!
…yours is still set lower than this!! …there are workarounds (cutting up the main hdr to smaller parts…) if you’d google it…

3

I forgot where you could change the limit in the source code, but if you import an HDR it’s read as a cubemap which like Maki said is restricted to 2k. However, by default your HDR images don’t use that resolution unless you tell it to. In the texture properties, disable mipmaps and set the max resolution to 2k.

You can also resave the file as an EXR. You get the same data without the restrictions in Unreal. You will have to re-do your UV setup in the mesh and material though.

4

I’m glad there is a reasonable way of doing it, setting the maximum resolution to 2048 is working for me.

The result:

1623×876 192 KB

And the setup:

1734×805 252 KB

I wonder why it sets the importing resolution for HDRs so low, that you have to manually scale it up to a decent size.

I also tried the .exr method, which I like more because of it’s flexibility in resolution, but man do I not understand how a behemoth like unreal still has no proper HDR-conversion and/or resizing tools at hand.

Anyways, thanks for helping out!

5

THX!! for taking the time to capture the setup… I need to check out the documentation more. here it states clear what the value for Maximum Texture Size does with HDRs: " A value of 0 means the maximum size for the format on each platform, except HDR long/lat cubemaps, which default to a resolution of 512."… But Ok, learned something new…