Why does baked texture in my viewport look worse than in tutorial's viewport?

[Gco808]

here is a comparison of a biplane from the texture baking tutorial

 

 

This is the image of the plane through the tutorial's 3dS Max Viewport

 

http://i202.photobucket.com/albums/aa151/Gco808/tutorialsviewportrenderingcopy.jpg

 

 

This is the image of the plane through my 3DS Max Viewport

 

http://i202.photobucket.com/albums/aa151/Gco808/biplanefrommyviewportcopy.jpg

 

 

 

As you can see, the second one is alot blurrier, I wonder why my viewport textures seem to have such a low resolution compared to the texture baked plane in the tutorial's viewport?

 

Is there a way to sharpen the textures so that my final baked biplane can look as sharp as the Tutorial's biplane textures?

[SandmanNinja]

Maybe your video card isn't as good as the one used by the instructor?

 

Maybe your resolution is different? If your resolution is higher than the resolution of the textures, then Max has to scale 'up' the texture graphics and they will lose quality.

 

Not sure - just some guesses.

[Gco808]

Hi sandman ! thanks for replying!

 

Here is my hardware setup:

 

Pentium IV 3.06 GHZ with Hyperthreading

1GB RDRAM

Geforce 6800 Ultra 256MB DDR3

Western Digital WD800 80GB 7,200rpm IDE ATA133

 

I hope this should be sufficient to produce decent images for 3Ds Max.

 

I will try to also reduce the resolution and see if that works... I'm currently using display resolution of 1600X1024

[batteryoperatedlettuce]

You probably have your Texel and MipMap look up settings set to linear.

 

If you haven't already done so, switch to OpenGL

 

 

Go to preferences > Viewports tab > Choose Driver > OpenGL then restart

 

then

 

Go to preferences > Viewports tab > Configure Driver > at the bottom there are two sets of radio check buttons. Select Texel lookup:nearest and MipMap lookup:None

 

These settings should also be slightly easier for your graphics card to handle, but it should be mentioned that the "Linear" setting can make it easier to view procedural maps when displaying things like tiles.

[Gco808]

oh wow thankyou I will give this a try!!! I tried Sandman's suggest but still didn't work =\ I hope this one will fix it.

[sterealkey]

What version of Max are you using?

 

In version 9 they added a cool feature. If you go to your Render window, under the "common" tab you must click on bitmap proxies, then tell it to display your bitmaps at full resolution > and then click the "OK, generate proxies now" button.

 

This will definately work, but only if you have max 9

 

I use this if I have to model something from photographs

[Gco808]

Thankyou so much Stereokey, Sandman, and BatteryLettuce!! The biplane looks very nice in the viewport now!

 

Though I wonder if cranking up the baked texture resolution to 2048 is normal to get this quality in the viewport. Anyways, it came out nice. Maybe it could look this good with 215X215 maps? it looked horrific even with 512x512 maps! It wasn't until I used 2048x2048 did it look decent in the viewport oh well.

 

Here is the adjustments I made to the configuration menu.

 

 

and here are some of the pics of the texture baked biplane.

 

 

 

 

I sure would wish the baked texture looked this good at 215x215 =\

[sterealkey]

Looking good Gco808.

 

One question though. Did you try my advice at all? I dont recall ever having to boost my resolution that much to get a good result.

 

Anyways, I'm glad it works now

[Gco808]

Hi sterealkey,

 

I tried your settings but now that I think of it, I didn't go back into uncheck the Match bitmap size as closely as possible in the viewport driver configuration dialog box, so maybe that's why I still had to use 2048 maps. Also, I wonder if my 1600x1024 screen reslution could be the reason why I have to use such large texture maps.

 

Are you able to get these similar results using 215x215 maps?