Hi,
I have a carpet texture that is getting a weird distortion when zoomed out and I am not sure how to get rid of it.
Up close you can tell the carpet is just a series of lines, when you zoom out it gets warps and gets lines going in the other direction. Images are attached
Your texture is not a power of 2. So it can’t be mip mapped.
Power of 2 = 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 etc…
The texture does not have to be squared. So it is allowed to have for example a 64 x 256 texture.
Map mapping is a process where it creates lower res versions of the texture, so it can show the lower res version when the camera is further away, to make sure you don’t get the weir distortion.
Here is more info:
As Roel said, your issue seems to be caused by bad mipmapping. For further background, what you’re seeing is not a distortion, it’s actually a moire pattern - the illusion of high contrast details merging together into a single pixel, with the engine attempting to interpolate (this will not only cause weird patterns to emerge, but also flickering as the camera moves).
Mip Mapping is the standard automatic fix for this - the engine will automatically create lower resolution versions of your texture (called mips), and transition to them depending on how many pixels of your screen the texture is occupying. In order to create these mip maps automatically, your texture resolution needs to be a power of 2 (See Roel’s answer for more info).
The other solution that we also have to consider - your textures should be detailed and contrast/noise balanced for the view to which you’ll see them in game. If you’ll never get close enough to your carpet texture to appreciate the detail in image #1, you should really create a beautiful texture for the view that you will have in game.