Please create a texture resolution import override

We’re having an issue with textures importing and being converted to very low resolution. From what we’re reading there’s some kind of automatic import scaling on textures that’s dependent on the size of the object itself. That’s great and all, but it’s incorrectly down scaling textures until they’re a blurry mess on any texture in our texture pool (and not currently on an object). Our only solution so far has been to manually scale the texture pool geometry to roughly the size of the object, but that’s a pain when dealing with a lot of pools of different scales, and especially for something like flooring where then we have to hide big sets of scaled up texture pools.

It’d be nice to be able to override the import size.

Do you see this problem only with textures in pools? Perhaps we could address it by automatically applying a target object scale for textures that are used by the material picker, without exposing a manual resolution override.

Yes, so far it’s only with texture pools as those materials upon scene upload are only applied to the pool objects, i.e. a series of planes, so they’re imported as low res textures on ‘small’ objects.

I think that’d work great too. If we either had a way to manually set the texture import resolution per material or the object target of a material we’d avoid having to hide and select from comically large texture pools in the scene as a workaround. It still means we’d have to reupload the textures for each material after manually setting the resolution or target, but it’d definitely be an improvement.

This is probably made worse for us right now since our client wants several objects to have up to 9 materials to select from, so we have a lot of texture pools in the scene.

There is one more approach to this issue.

The automatic texture scaling factor depends on how much the texture is stretched on a surface, but not how large the surface is. The more stretched the texture is, the higher the auto-scaled texture resolution will be. So, each square in your texture pool can be even as small as 10x10 centimeters, provided that it is covered only by a part of the texture corresponding to 10x10 centimeters surface in real world. This should already give you reasonable auto-scaling resolution, but if you’d like to use higher resolution, then cover your 10x10 centimiters square with texture part corresponding to even smaller surface in real world, eg. 5x5 centimiters (texture stretching factor = 2).

There is one caveat described here: Material picker problem - #5 by wojtek Any texture that can be potentially tiled after applying it from the material picker should be already tiled in the material pool. So, for each such texture create an additional 10x10 centimiters square in the texture pool, but this time, when applying the texture, shrink the texture mapping so that the texture is tiled on this small square (eg. the texture occurs 2x2 times on the square).

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Awesome, thanks for the insight–this would be great info to have in documentation.

With Wojtek’s advise, do you think that taking into account material pickers configuration while calculating the textures resolution is necessary for your use-case?

After thinking more how to approach this, it is quite challenging, because material pickers may not be configured while the scene is imported, so each change in the material picker config can require regeneration of textures in different resolutions.

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@jan No, I don’t think it’s necessary. In most cases, re-uploading textures so they can be recalculated wouldn’t be an issue. I am more frustrated with having to fight an automated system I know nothing about, and having to waste time using trial and error than simply re-uploading textures after setting the material pickers so they can be recalulcated and optimized for the materials/objects the pickers are using.

I urge your team to create documentation for texture and model import, explain how UV space correlates to image resolution/optimization, explain how the geometry gets combined based on material after upload, and walk through all of the settings.

The Vray team has created incredible documentation that would be a great reference for your team and product as an example of what the professional community expects for a tool like you’re building, Documentation - Chaos Help

Thanks for the suggestion about creating more training & reference materials.

For now, if you can’t find something in the docs, or if you have any questions or doubts, please continue asking on the forum. Usually you will get an answer pretty fast.

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