Making face textures render at highest res regardless of settings. Possible?

[FinnenH4wke]

Andromeda's textures at Ultra can be quite demanding on VRAM. However the face textures look horrible when the Texture Quality is dropped from Ultra to High (they become blurry). I assume that's because on High the textures are taken from "pool" of lower resolution assets - is there any way to set Texture Quality to High or Medium in game settings for all stuff like landscape, armor and so on, yet have ONLY face textures rendered at Ultra quality?

 

I'm not pro but as far as I know this is caused by mipmapping, right? Every texture has few variants - for example 2048x2048, 1024x1024, 512x512, 256x256 and so on. I assume that when textures are set to Ultra then the game picks highest resolution available, but on High or Medium it takes lower mip map, like 1024x1024 or 512x512. Is there any way to stop this process ONLY for face textures? Could it possible to resave face textures in Photoshop without creating mipmaps? Then the game would have only one variant of that texture (high res one) and would have to load it regardless of the settings. Am I right?

 

Could this work? Do you have some other ideas how to tackle this issue? This could be a good way to save VRAM on cheaper GPUs. Set global texture quality to Medium and install a mod that restores Ultra textures for faces only. Good looking characters + saved VRAM ;)

Edited June 19, 2017 by kazuyuki

[Ehamloptiran]

I would not suggest saving textures out without mip maps, sure it'll load only the highest one, but this also means it will render the highest one no matter the distance to the camera, meaning in the distance u'll get a kind of swimming effect where the detail out weights the resolution. As for ur particular query, on first glance I dont think it can be done, it appears it would be a global thing, ie. Ultra load mip 0, High load mip 2, medium load mip 3, etc.

[FinnenH4wke]

I see, so while it will work for cutscenes well enough, it will at the same time work really bad when looking at characters during gameplay from distance (for example on the Tempest) :/ Damn. Hmm, then maybe I could mitigate it differently by simply upscaling the texture one notch up. Let's say, for pure example, that all face textures have 2048x2048 resolution on Ultra. In that case the mip maps would look like that:

 

0 - 2048x2048

1 - 1024x1024

2 - 512x512

3 - 256x256

4 - 128x128

 

If I would upscale face textures's resolution to 4096x4096, then situation would look like this:

 

0 - 4096x4096

1 - 2048x2048

2 - 1024x1024

3 - 512x512

4 - 256x256

 

So, assuming that textures on "Ultra" choose mip map 0 and textures on "High" take mip map 1, then I would get my effect without destroying rest of the lower mip maps. Basically mip map "1" would be of the same resolution as "0" before. Sure, the 4096x4096 will be basically upscaled one but it's not important, it won't be used anyway since "High" setting will use only from mip map 1 and higher. Worth trying?

Edited June 19, 2017 by kazuyuki