Overhead games - best ways to deal with mipmaps and texture (un)sharpness?

Development Rendering
,
1

Like the title says, I’m wondering if anyone has any experienced advice on what the best practices are, specific to unreal rendering, when it comes to overhead games (i.e. ARPG games, or possibly RTS games.)

When dealing with an overhead camera, the first thing you notice is mipmaps. Unless you’re zoomed in really close, you very quickly start to chain out through the mipmaps, obviously losing texture detail.

Since I first started my project, I’ve been hand-adjusting the “Mip Gen Settings” on specific textures. I usually found “Sharpen 7” seemed decent. And turning off the mipmaps entirely doesn’t seem like a great idea? (because then you get some grainy pixelated problems on certain textures.)

I also experimented with sharpen on post-processing, but I always disliked when games (or player-made filters) oversharpen everything. And if you only use a small amount, it doesn’t seem to help the problem much. Unless there’s a good combination of settings to use?

Any experienced ARPG devs have any advice?

  • Best texture sizes?
  • Best filtering options?
  • Best post-processing settings?
  • Any tricks specific to UE?

Thanks!

2

Disable mips alltogeter for the specific asset/material.
It can be a great idea.

Mips get in the way 90% of the time - depending on what device you want to support you may not even need them.
The GFX memory pool is fairly high now a days. If you need to prioritize clarity of one asset meant to be critical for gameplay over memory, you can likely do so safely.

1 Like