Skybox resolution issues

I'm attaching two images. The first is what my skybox image (single panel) looks like in Gimp. It is 512x512 (resolution chosen b/c that's what the resolutions of the standard skybox images are). The second is how that skybox looks in Unity. You'll notice that the Unity version looks very blurry.

I have tried creating a similar image in Gimp with resolution set to 4096X4096, and it still looks blurry in Unity. How can I get the Unity rendition of this image to look as good as the way it looks when I create it in Gimp?

 

The only way to get a 512x512 skybox to look as sharp in-game is if the game resolution is 512x512 or smaller. The more it has to be scaled up the blurrier it gets. Try making one 1024x1024, and make sure it's not scaled smaller in the import settings.

--Eric

 

As I had mentioned (nice sky btw,) you can fudge the FOV a bit, but not by much.

Eric (who we all depend on ), has the best solution - you have to limit the game window resolution.

Hmmm, I need to try that myself - I don't really like my FOV at 70!

-Will

 

But I'm such a fan of high resolutions. What I'm trying to currently do is just create an extremely high resolution skybox image (4096x4096) to see if I get better results (pretty much what Eric was suggesting). However, my machine keeps choking on it as I process the image when I am working on it, so I may just have to give in to limited resolutions.

Will, thanks for the compliment, but I can't take all the credit. There are just some darn good tutorials on how to create starfields. I was worried, not being any sort of an artist, that my art assets were going to really suffer. However, I'm learning that, with all the scripts, filters, etc. in these apps these days, you don't have to be that good of an artist to produce decent assets.

 

4096 is too high (and many cards won't support that anyway); just do 1024, or 2048 max. Stars are more sensitive to resolution since it's more obvious when they're scaled up, whereas clouds are naturally kind of blurry to begin with.

--Eric

 

Ok. I'll try the 2048 range. I tried 1024, and it still comes across as blurry (but not nearly much as so).

 

Just to update on this issue. I'm using Unity 4.6. The image resolution is 2000x4000 (I know this is crazy big). Skybox is crystal clear now but painful side would definitely be downloading the image from API, import into texture and store it.