VaM 1.x Texture quality is butchered

[GoblinTerry]

Hi all,


I am having a problem with any and all textures loaded onto a person atom. There apears to be this jarring line going down the neck, which is the seam between the Face and Torso textures. From the looks of it, the Torso texture is heavily compressed whereas the Face texture seems fine.

I thought it was something do do with my settings, but there is nothing under User Prefs that could affect specific texture regions. Then I thought it was a Decal Maker 2 thing, so I removed it to load the skin manually, the old fashioned way, only to see that the line persisted. So I load a new Person atom with nothing on her, and the line was still there. I updated my graphic drivers. I changed the drive my VaM is on. I even did a fresh install of VaM thinking I royally fucked something up at one point, then loaded up the default scene, only to see the issue still there. So no matter what I do to VaM, the issue seems eternal.

The reason I think it's an actual issue, and not something that's just meant to be there, is because never have I seen something remotely similar on anyone else's pictures. Be in on the forum, discord, twitter, or anywhere at all, they all look perfectly fine. On top of that, if this was something that was just a part of VaM, and everyone had it, surely I wouldn't be the first person to bring it up, right? But I can't find any similar posts at all.

Is there a way to fix this? Or at least figure out where this issue stems from? Could it be hardware related? I wanna say that maybe my gpu is having a rough time but it doesn't look like the typa shit you see when experiencing gpu death...


Thank you in advance to whoever is able to lend a hand,
-PlusTerry

 

[hazmhox]

It's not an actual issue as you suggest.
The texel density on the torso and the face is not the same. You have a 4K texture just for the face, and you have a 4K texture for the torso.
And obviously, if you look at the proportion "size wise" of the head compared to the whole torso, your 4K for the body needs to cover way more space than for the head.

All this comes down to how the texture is made by the creator. If you work on the normals/details properly, you can have a proper "mid distance" aspect, but upclose you will always have the texel density issue.
If you check Ren's texture they also have that effect. For instance, the default Kayla which is one of the best skin also has the same thing.

Which is completely normal. If you allocate the same amount of pixels to a 4 times smaller area, the overall visual quality is directly influenced.

Which is why ingame models for retail games ensure to have a very homogenous texel density AND on top of that, use some shaders to add some close up details to avoid these discrepencies.

 

[hazmhox]

Bonus: this is my udim of Kitarah, my next release.

If it does not speaks to you immediately, here's what you can conclude from this on top of what I was saying above :

• Ears by themselves have more than the resolution allocated to the chest and breasts.
• All limbs ( arms, legs ) have almost the same resolution as the face only
• fingernails (top right of the middle section) have somewhate the same resolution as ears

If you look at these different parts ingame on a character, you will see how it has an influence on the texture quality.

If you want a conclusion: UV is kind of "meh". It focuses on quality and maximizing the UV space, without accounting for texel density. Unless you'd come up with shaders to compensate for that, it's gonna end up like what you have in your initial post : )