Merge Actors - Texture quality is bad

Hi all,

I´m trying to save some performance (draw calls) by merging some meshes with multiple materials on it.
for that i´m using the merge actor tool.

I´ve now tried various combinations but i end up every time with a merged mesh and blurry, looks-like low resolution textures.

The image shows on the left side the original with a texture size of 2048, on the right i set up the texture size to 2048 too.
Even if i try higher resolutions, more or less additional maps accordingly the materials i´ve or baking the vertex color into, the result is every time a much lower quality texture

Here some more pictures

A little more zoomed in

From the side of the roof, you can see it good at the wood

Somebody knows the issue and can help me out there`?

Best regards,
Maik

When you merge there is an option to Merge Materials. Merging materials also merges the texture maps. A 2k texture will fit 4 merged objects by laying out the textures in a 512 grid, 8 objects at 256px grid etc. to fit into the 2k map.

You can view this yourself by looking at the new textures in your content-browser. They will be aligned in a grid-like I have described.

EDIT: AFAIK To avoid this, you must combine your mesh outside of unreal and manually refit the UV’s so you have one 2k texture for your whole object, otherwise you have to deal with the loss of quality as your texture is compressed to fit into the grid.

Thanks for the clarification, then i´ve to map the uv and align them properly with the textures to have it like before.

I guess then this feature is less for optimizing in focus object rather than background objects that are less important.

Proper English and sentence structure would allow other users like me to follow up more easily. It’s hard to understand if and how the issue was solved.

Hi there,

Im going trough the same issue at the moment and i read this post but but i don’t understand how it was solved… Can we have a short explanation please? Trying to find answers since 3 days but no luck.

Thank you!

There is no real solution out of the box.

You´ve either two possibilities AFAIK:

  • Take the merge actor function from UE4 and the tradeoff it brings (quality loss)
  • Merge the meshes in blender, map the UV´s and align the materials accordingly

If you want to optimize objects far away, you can checkout the HLOD functionality from UE4 too.
It all depends on what you´re trying to archive / optimize

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