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Gmax objects causing blurry textures

D

dr_psyser

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17
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australia
G'day Everyone

I have had this problem happen with two of my scenery projects, and it is driving me up the wall!

They are both re-workings of old scenery releases - originally done in gmax 1.1 and touched up with gmax 1.2.

As the screenshots tell, everything is hunkidori until about 10km or so - and then all textures (gmax objects, landclass/photoreal, aircraft and VC textures) go blurry. All the beta testers for one of these projects are experiencing the exact same problem.
YPJT.jpg

Has anyone experienced this with their own work, and/or does anyone have any ideas on what may be causing it? :banghead:

Cheers

Jarrad

PS - The big white squares don't mean a thing.... "work in progress" :scratchch
 
This must have something to do with LOD's. But i dont know any more about it, maybe you should remove the mipmaps of your textures.

Thijs
 
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There has been quite a big discussion about problems like this on AvSim recently. The main conclusion there was that mixing different textures formats (DXT vs non DXT, with and without mipmaps) was the main source of this problem. But one point that cures all trouble has not (yet) been found I am afraid.
 
Thanks guys

Thijs, already tried that mate, to no avail unfortunately.

Arno, cheers for the heads-up mate. I did have a few old 8-bit textures, although converting these to DXT1 doesn't appear to do the trick. I will remove all the UVW and material properties, and play around. Will post my findings when I can.

Cheers again

Jarrad
 
Hello!
I did all the the textures almost anyway with dxt3 and in dxtbmp aplyed an alpha to supress the mipmaps saved and I had no moore blurry textures
That worked for me anyway.
Regards
Cornel
 
I also had this problem, although the textures began blurrying when only 500m away. I found then, that I forgot to give some bmps mipmaps. Since ev'ry texture in my scenery has mipmaps it's OK. But maybe that's not the solution for your prob.
 
Hmm, maybe the problem is using textures with and without mipmaps. But what reason is there to not use mipmaps? They seem to be pretty useful, aren't they?
 
Hi,

Just out of curiosity do you have any textures that are the following,

1024x512
512x256

I've had this problem with two projects I've done, I dont know what the cause is exactly, but I only changed 2 things, I removed any Gmax transparent material, and changed any textures that are like above, to 1024x1024 or 512x512 and remapped the models. The problem has gone now.

But

there was another small project I done which also had this problem, I tracked it down to the airport tower (when i removed it from the scenery the blurriness stopped), I couldnt get the blurriness to stop, so I rebuilt the tower using the same texture and it worked fine.

Almost all my textures are 512x512 with the odd 1024x1024, all DXT1 & DXT3 with mipmaps, except ground polys which are DXT3 with Alpha no mipmaps.

Stevo
 
Using mip maps when making a scenery with gmax will cause blurry textures that was what one man tought me and by aplying an alpha to the texture like dxt3 with alpha will supress the mipmaps and the texture wont be blurred anymoore I can assure you because I got an entire airport made in this way and it never blurres sharp and nice textures.
But there semes to be many opinions about this and in the end maybe there is just not only one solution to this
But for me it works and thanks God for that :)
 
Hello

Using mip maps when making a scenery with gmax will cause blurry textures
Click to expand...

This can't be true, because almost all the textures I use do have mipmaps, I once spent an hour removing all mipmap to see if it would remove the blurry issue and it did'nt, the same thing occured. So I concluded this wasnt the problem for my blurry issue.

Correct me if i'm wrong anyone, but all I believe mipmaps are for, is to reduce the texture quality of an object as you move further away from it, thus saving memory. If you where to use a 1024x1024 DXT texture without mipmaps on a object, and you are 1m away from it, it should use the same amount of memory as if you where 2000m away from it because its still the same size. If you used a 1024x1024 DXT texture with mipmap by the time you are 2000m away it will have reduced the texture to say, for example 128x128 DXT or 64x64.

Thats how I beleive mips works, but I could be wrong.

Stevo ;)
 
No you are quite right on this one!
But for me it was the only solution to get ridd off the blurrieness!
I will have some moore investigation on this issue since it is really confusing! :confused:
Cornel
 
Keep on banging your head..I will banging my head on this one see what we could come up with!
Cornel
 
Hi,

Stevo is right about how the mipmaps work. I also use them on (almost) all of my objects and fortunately I have never had the blurry problem as discussed here.

Also, I would like to mention that there are two kind of blurry problems. One is the one described by the thread starter of this thread. All textures, including the terrain go blurry.

There is also another one, where only the textures of your GMax object itself go blurry. This is usually caused by a wrong scale set by MakeMDL. Therefore FS does not switch the mipmaps at the correct distance. This problem is easy to solve by correcting the scale, but that does not solve the first type of blurry problems.
 
Hi Arno

The problems i've had are both models and terrain going blurry, It's an annoyance more than anything when it happens, because I know its something I've done, and it could be one small thing that could be the cause.

I think its a problem with either the texture size or the models are exported with errors (because of the tower mentioned in the earlier post). Or both.

I've also found two aircraft that cause the same problem, I built a terminal for Aerojet Virtual Airways and everything was working fine with the default boeing 737, when I change the aircraft to the Project Opensky A330-200 everything when blurry, the only I could solve this was to reduce the texture size of the Aircraft texture, which solved the issue, also Alpha Sims Lighting also does the same.

Stevo :wave:
 
Hi Stevo,

It is indeed a complex problem. And as you indicate it can also be caused by addon aircraft. So it might not only be a problem of your new scenery. It is your scenery in combination with something else.

In the AvSim thread where this was discussed one of the conclusions also was that maybe aircraft using textures without mipmaps could also cause it.

As that many factors seems to contribute to this problem, I am afraid we will never find a solution like "If you fix this, it will work".
 
arno said:
There is also another one, where only the textures of your GMax object itself go blurry. This is usually caused by a wrong scale set by MakeMDL. Therefore FS does not switch the mipmaps at the correct distance. This problem is easy to solve by correcting the scale, but that does not solve the first type of blurry problems.
Click to expand...

I've got this problem, Arno. How do you correct the scale?
 
Either increase the scale in the texturelist manual, or use the little tool I have made for this. You can find it here.
 
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