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Old 07-29-2015, 10:00 AM
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knowom
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A 2048x2048 texture with compression artifacts you will only really see if you are looking for them is usually much nicer than a 1024x1024 downscaled and blurrier texture where the higher quality details have been lost completely. Both take the same amount of ram and memory bandwidth to read, but the perceived quality increase of having 4 times as many pixels is significant. The average user probably won't be able to tell if you are compressing their textures or not, but most will be able to see a halving of texel resolution quite easily. DXT3 and 5 are similar if you use them in the correct context (5 for smooth alpha gradients, 3 for sharp alpha transitions).
http://www.gamedev.net/topic/611111-...aled-textures/


For Grobb retexture project I used 2048x2048 textures with DXT3 for smooth alpha transitions though id probably use DXT5 instead now and also use that GIMP plugin BIMP with unsharp mask set to like 1 or 2 instead. DXT2-5 are 4:1 compression ratio so the size of the textures used offset most or all lossy behavior to be on par with Luclin or Luclin revamps to classic zone 256x256 and 512x512 texture sizes. Titanium came with embarrassingly poor worse classic zone textures some were 32x32 I think and others 64x64 compared to the revamped textures Luclin provided for older zones.

Just use higher resolution base textures to compensate for the 4:1 compression if your worried about the DXT 3/5 lossy aspect.

Something worth mentioning that is quite interesting is hq4x or xBRZ filters http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbrz/
https://code.google.com/p/hqx/

Character models and objects in particular would be handy do use it with in fact someone at p1999 did experiment with hqx3 awhile back I'm assuming hq4x wasn't released at that point in time. Even better perhaps would be to duplicate the base texture once or twice each for a overlay layer of XBRZ/HQx4 filter versions of original textures then merge it down to blend the two together. You could also use some transparency between the filter layers and a unsharp mask filter on the top layer prior to merge down or after it just as way to sharper the image a bit wouldn't hurt either.

I'd probably have a ZBRZ layer with unsharp mask 25-75% transparency overlayed on top of a HQx4 layer with 25-75% transparency overlayed onto the original texture merge it down and export it however you want DDS/DXT3/5.

The two filters work a bit differently and look a bit different, but combining the base texture with both the other two filters and overlay plus optional transparency should provide a good mixture that looks a bit more natural with a fairly gradual cell shaded look that's not so harsh in terms of aliasing, but also not over smooth and cartoon looking either.
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