Photogrammetry asset texture display quality

Development Asset Creation
1

Hi,

I have a question regarding photogrammetry assets in the editor (4.27). I have a few high quaslity assets that I have created in Reality Capture and imported into Unreal.

The source asset has been poly-reduced and texture re-projected from the original hi-res asset which has 4x 8k textures so its great quality.

I have exported two versions and imported them into unreal:

1 with 1x8k texture
1 with 4x8k textures

However in the editor i cant tell the difference between them - if i place both assets next to each other there is no perceivable difference . even if i overlay them on top of each other there is no perceivable difference.

i would have thought that the asset with 4x8k textures would be superior to the one with 1x8k ?

any help here would be much appreciated!

2

To be able to see the difference you would have to look at the item at a screensize where the texture being bigger would produce a clear benefit.

With good assets this often goes well beyond the clipping value the engine uses as default.

You could try to set up a custom camera with a zoom like lense value or something similar.

Also, render size matters.
If your end viewport is only 1k for instance not much of the texture will ever be visible…

3

yes you are right and thanks for the tip - however seems like reality capture is just packing tons of empty space into my texturemaps. Even though my source photos are hi-res if RC renders at a lower overall DPI when i force a unwrap its still just packing 4k of texture data into the 16k map.

4

Maybe what you could do is to re-capture or bake the object in Blender.

You would need to produce a copy with a different/clean UV map, then bake from the high detail to the low detail.

This will change the mess in the uv to conform with whatever you designed.

Also, some programs like Meshroom allow you to do it internally.
You override the model it creates with one you made in the same shape, and it just forces it to bake to the UV you designed.

5

What file type are you importing as? I know UE4 tries to do it’s own compression so if you import as png it gets compressed twice. Idk if that will effect the quality…

Then also there’s lod settings for your texture, not sure what you have those set to. But you could have the bias set to something low by default?