Decals resolution

Last Updated on Tuesday, 27 July 2010 23:09 Written by Thomas Tuesday, 27 July 2010 10:40

The low resolution of the smaller decals on the fuselage have been bothering me ever since the beginning of the project. The overall exterior texture resolution is rather low, since I started out with only two texture sheets to keep the model flyable on computers with average specs (in 2004). Over the years I have added more textures, but never bothered to re-texture the fuselage and wings.This means that the decals are still only a few pixels wide and of course have no text. No problem at some distance, but close-up screenshots look outright ugly.

I have been messing around with this problem for a few days, detaching the decals to their own polygons and adding a separate decal texture sheet with higher res. Now the decals look fine, but they are ill matched to the low-res fuselage. It just looks odd to have a high-res decal on a fuzzy/pixelated hatch (see screenshot above). So I decided to shelve this idea for the time being, and instead re-texture the whole exterior when I migrate to 3DSMax for version 5.0 sometime in the beginning of next year.

/Tom