How can I prevent seams from showing up on objects using lower mipmap levels?

Posted by Shivan Dragon on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Shivan Dragon
Published on 2013-02-25T21:40:55Z Indexed on 2014/08/20 10:36 UTC
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Disclaimer: kindly right click on the images and open them separately so that they're at full size, as there are fine details which don't show up otherwise. Thank you.

I made a simple Blender model, it's a cylinder with the top cap removed:

enter image description here

I've exported the UVs:

enter image description here

Then imported them into Photoshop, and painted the inner area in yellow and the outer area in red. I made sure I cover well the UV lines:

enter image description here

I then save the image and load it as texture on the model in Blender. Actually, I just reload it as the image where the UVs are exported, and change the viewport view mode to textured. When I look at the mesh up-close, there's yellow everywhere, everything seems fine:

enter image description here

However, if I start zooming out, I start seeing red (literally and metaphorically) where the texture edges are:

enter image description here

And the more I zoom, the more I see it:

enter image description here

Same thing happends in Unity, though the effect seems less pronounced. Up close is fine and yellow:

enter image description here

Zoom out and you see red at the seams:

enter image description here

Now, obviously, for this simple example a workaround is to spread the yellow well outside the UV margins, and its fine from all distances. However this is an issue when you try making a complex texture that should tile seamlessly at the edges. In this situation I either make a few lines of pixels overlap (in which case it looks bad from upclose and ok from far away), or I leave them seamless and then I have those seams when seeing it from far away.

So my question is, is there something I'm missing, or some extra thing I must do to have my texture look seamless from all distances?

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