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Particles (Shuriken): Billboard renderer overcompresses and skews texture

Discussion in 'Editor & General Support' started by thePostFuturistUnity, Mar 7, 2013.

  1. thePostFuturistUnity

    thePostFuturistUnity

    Joined:
    Nov 16, 2012
    Posts:
    53
    Hello,

    Making a simple matrix text effect and confused as to how the Shuriken particle system compresses the texture.

    Mesh renderer displays the texture fine, while the billboard renderer skews them vertically and REALLY compresses them.

    $Screen Shot 2013-03-06 at 5.42.42 PM.png $Screen Shot 2013-03-06 at 5.42.24 PM.png

    Anyone know how I can make the billboard renderer have the same compression as the mesh renderer, or fix whatever it is I'm doing wrong to make the texture on the right look identical as on the left?
     
  2. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

    Joined:
    Dec 29, 2011
    Posts:
    15,617
    Can you provide screenshots so that we can see the effect you're trying to fix?

    As far as I know, Shuriken uses the same texture resources as the rest of Unity, so the compression shouldn't be different. However, there's a lot in Shuriken which changes how things are displayed, and depending on the details of your problem it could come from practically anywhere in there. The vertical skewing sounds like there's some kind of velocity scaling applied to the particles, so first of all I suggest looking for any settings along those lines and removing them. That in itself could make the compression look terrible, but it could also come down to things like render settings.
     
  3. Alf203

    Alf203

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    Your mesh is most likely shaped as a rectangle I would guess (e.g. something like ratio 2:1)? A billboard is always a square so that is probably why your textured shows up skewed.

    Also compressed doesn't mean skewed. Compressed means that the texture has gone through some process that makes its size smaller and sometimes introduces artifacts because of that. In your case it does not seem related to compression.

    Anyway, the solutions I see are to use stretched billboard or keep using the mesh. Another option could be to modify your texture so it is square shaped (e.g. 128x128) and then the billboard should work.
     
  4. thePostFuturistUnity

    thePostFuturistUnity

    Joined:
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    Thanks for the responses.

    @angrypenguin:

    $Screen Shot 2013-03-06 at 6.22.13 PM.png $Screen Shot 2013-03-06 at 6.22.36 PM.png

    I'm not sure what you mean by "velocity scaling". Do you mean size by speed? Not on. As far as render settings - those screengrabs are straight from the Editor, I haven't found a parameter to adjust quality for that. As far as texture compression settings, even if I go at the higher possible quality (GUI/Truecolor/Trilinear), it still doesn't look as well as the mesh.

    @Alf203: That's correct - I'm using a 256x512 mesh that I'm then applying a texture animation on. I understand the difference between compressed and skewed :). You misread my post - I'm stating it's both. Stretched billboard makes it look somewhat like aurora borealis, still compresses/skews/looks like s***:

    $Screen Shot 2013-03-06 at 6.30.23 PM.png

    Using mesh is not an option as I need a texture sheet animation, which as far as I read is unsupported for mesh.
     
    Last edited: Mar 7, 2013
  5. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    I can't see your base texture, so I'm not sure, but is it your "tiles" X and Y settings? You have it set to 8 x 1, but assuming they're square surely that should be 4 x 2 based on your texture size?
     
    Last edited: Mar 7, 2013
  6. thePostFuturistUnity

    thePostFuturistUnity

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    That did it!

    I don't understand why, though. It's 8 32px tiles in one row, 8 columns, why would it be 4 x 2?
     
  7. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    That doesn't sound right, since you said your texture was 256x512.

    Oh, I just noticed my capitalisation in my previous post. Oops!
     
  8. thePostFuturistUnity

    thePostFuturistUnity

    Joined:
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    Why not?

    Here's the layout:

    $Screen Shot 2013-03-06 at 9.23.55 PM.png

    8 columns, 1 row.

    edit: sorry - I should have said that that was the culprit, not that it fixed it - changing the values to 1x1 actually made it the way it should be.
     
    Last edited: Mar 7, 2013
  9. Alf203

    Alf203

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    Glad you got it to work. But it also should work with stretched billboard as follows :

    -You need to rotate your texture 90 degree (in photoshop or gimp) otherwise it will look wrong.
    -Then set the texture animation to WholeSheet and set X to 1 and Y to 8.
    -Use the length scale parameter in the render module to adjust the length.