I am encountering an issue where some objects, when zoomed out, display a UV seam, when zoomed in they disappear. The line is where the UV seam is. I have tried playing with flood limit with no luck. Not sure what this is. There are no overlapping faces. Looks fine in zbrush and in 3ds MAX.
This appears to have been related to the texture map. The background of it was black so when that was replaced with another color (gree average) it went away. So I assume something about zoom distance affected how the seam appeared.
Right, for diffuse textures GPU uses mipmaps - lower resolution versions of textures that are used when an object is viewed from larger distances. The mipmaps are generated automatically by downscaling the original textures. As it was the case with your apples, if the original texture is surrounded by background significantly different in color, this background may become visible when a lower resolution mip is used.
I was a duh moment when I realized that
Another somewhat related question
I have a large map I need to keep clear and crisp so I have carved it into pieces and mapped each back to a plane, 1 map per 1 quad, there is opacity involved and now there is a grid pattern showing up around the boundary of those maps and geo. Any tips on how to cope with that?
Would it make any difference to use a JPG with a added opacity map vs a PNG with opacity? I would not imagine. The source mat is setup as a multisub applied via matid to each region.
I hope you will share your project here, once you are finished. From the screenshots you shared it already looks really interesting 
What is an image resolution for the whole map that you aim to achieve? Would 2048x2048 work or do you need a better resolutions?
If 2048x2048 would be enough, you could use this advice from Kuba: Advice for lighting - #4 by Kuba to prevent down-scaling of a texture without splitting the geometry into quads.
I was hoping for at least 4k as the user(s) would be able to go from a high full map view to ground level.
Since 2k is the max texture size is there any way to restrict the camera? Force them to only use premade views, To restrict free roaming or only allow movement within a given volume? This way the user can never get too close to see the degradation of the map.
I have tried using a 1m x 1m object with the same map applied and no matter the scale of the UV it seems to have no affect on the outcome.
It would be handy to have a local override to allow some maps to have higher resolution. I understand the maps size and download volume issues that could arise. I would rather have control over that however as I could direct where to spend detail so to speak.
You can use fully transparent surfaces to restrict movements.
You could also try appending #nobasis hash to your scene address to force the use of non-compressed textures and see how quality changes.
We are thinking of allowing control for texture scaling. There are more and more art galleries done with Shapespark for which such controls would help to improve quality of important art work.
The white dots between the quads can be a result of inaccurate representation of objects position. If each quad has a separate texture it needs to be a separate object. For geometry instances detection purposes and to improve compression of geometry, Shapespark transforms each object to be placed at the [0, 0, 0] origin, and stores a transformation to be applied to the object to move it back to a correct place in a scene. Floating point inaccuracies can cause the objects that perfectly aligned to have a tiny gap between them after such transformation.
ahh, ok. I was using a single mesh with multi-sub textures.
Good to know thanks!