thats the problem, “Streaming Distance Multiplier” has a default of 1.0, if I change this to 2.0 then the texture becomes high-res, and strangely, when I change it to 0.0, the texture becomes high-res also!
values like 0.9 or 1.1 are still low-res.
It is really unclear what this value is doing and why it is working like that.
Now, checking “Use Maximum Streaming Texel Ratio” fixes the problem also.
Now stepping through the ue4 engine code something looks strange:
in UStaticMesh::GetStreamingTextureFactor
when I looked at the problematic model
the MaxStreamingTextureFactor is so far from what is listed in the StreamingTextureFactors array!?
here is an example of a potentially good mesh:
see how the MaxStreamingTextureFactor actually matches the max value in the StreamingTextureFactors array
the only difference is on this model that is broken I am using a really high resolution texture (2k) while our other textures are around (512) and we have started importing models with uniform scale of 100 so that could be another source of the problem.