Texture settings help (Mip Gen Settings, LOD Bias, Power of Two Mode)

Development Rendering
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Hi,

I’m looking into setting up the correct settings of all of our textures in UE4. I read through epic’s documentation on settings but they explain roughly what the thing does, but don’t go into specifics what settings are needed for specific projects. So I have a couple of questions about these 3 important settings.

  1. Mip Gen Settings: I understand that when the object is further away from camera, it uses a smaller texture resolution. But what settings should I choose here? Probably SimpleAverage or Sharpen 0-5 in most cases. But what’s the difference between SimpleAverage and Sharpen? I read that Simple average uses a 2x2 Kernel, and Sharpen settings 8x8 Kernel size. What is Kernel size and what impact has that on performance?

  2. LOD Bias: It seems setting the LOD Bias to 1 makes my texture half the size (makes a 2k texture into a 1k texture) and setting it to 2 makes it a 512 texture. I thought the 2k texture would be kept, and the 1k or 512 texture would pop in when the camera is further away from the camera? What exactly does the LOD Bias setting do?

  3. Power of Two mode: What should I pick here? When should I use “None” and when should I use “Padding to power of 2” and “Padding to power of 2 square”? What does the padding do?

  4. Texture Group: It’s set to “World” atm, when should I use a different texture group, Where can I set the settings of the texture group? I understand that LOD Bias gets added with Texture Group’s LOD Bias, but where can I set the settings of the texture group?

Thanks in advance!

Stefan

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  1. To my knowledge these do not have an impact on performance. The mip should already be generated with texture compression, these settings are just referring to what should happen to the mip to potentially improve visual quality. These are up to you and the nature of the texture. Sharpening can help keep small-scale details visible at longer distances, but can also create moire patterns and unwanted flickering. You just have to see what works best.

  2. This is identical to the Max Texture Resolution option, but I think LOD Bias is controllable through platform configs so Xbox can get a lower texture compared to PC. I don’t think Max Resolution was available in that manner the last time we checked. It just offsets your texture resolution, you won’t get the original res.

  3. Nothing, if your texture is already a power of 2. This is only for the textures that aren’t a power of 2. If you have a texture like that, you can set them and see what it does. Again, just depends on the texture and the usage.

  4. This is set based on your own requirements for performance. It’s a good way to control a group of textures. I forgot where the ini file is, but there is one that specifies the mipmap settings, filtering, max resolution, etc. They’re all really similar by default though.

1 Like
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Thanks for the answers. This helps me a lot!