Keeping images from pixelating (should I be using vector images)

[Gadget Girl]

Alright, need some photoshop help. I'm trying to make a field of Fleur de Lis for my barding for Harry. (If you don't know this would be the French coat of arms). This was an example where I just grabbed and image and slapped it on, but I don't like how it tiled, and I don't think I could distribute that file anyway.

Split Barding

• Gadget Girl
• Jul 20, 2016
• 5
• fantasy harry harry - hivewire horse horse

A quick test of my split barding for Harry

But hey, the internet is full of images of Fleur de Lis that I can reuse and modify. The problem seems to be resolution. Lots of these images are pretty high resolution, so an image of a single fleur is often 1000x1000 and at that resolution they look great, but as soon as I start scaling them down the pixelation becomes pretty bad.

So when I started looking to see if I could find an image that started out smaller I kept find .svg files, which I wasn't familiar with. Should I be using vector images for something like this? Or is there a trick so I don't get this:

 

[RAMWolff]

In Photoshop if you have it tiling via the Layer Style> Pattern Overlay you have a scaling slider..

 

[Rae134]

hmmm I'm wondering if Psr/DS (I can't remember which you use) cant handle the vector file and is substituting the jpg preview which would be low res? (vectors should be able to scale as big/small as you like as they don't rely on pixels).

(In the first image that hole you are seeing is most likely due to half a Fleur de Lis being needed to tile there)

 

[Jan]

Can't help with the actual problem, but am so glad to see you are making a Barding for Harry. I have been looking for something like this for my Knights horses.

 

[seachnasaigh]

If there's a compelling reason to using that approach, just disregard me, but you're using a P4 way of texturing. In Poser, you can use a single fleur de lis image of modest size, and tile it onto the cloth in the material room. It will retain excellent resolution at low cost in system resources. This would also allow you to selectively give only the the fleur de lis areas anisotropy and metallicity, as if they were embroidered onto the cloth with gold thread.
I would also tile the cloth, perhaps at a different scale.
This will work for P5+:

This is from an old project (my Narnia wardrobe) which I reloaded into P11Pro to get a screenshot; I would definitely do the metallicity differently now, but the concept remains: a single seamless rose & lace tile, repeated at six times the rate of the seamless blue silk tile. The overall tiling rate is set by the value boxed in red. I set it to 1 for the screenshot so that you could see the rose & lace tile, but it is set at twelve for the cloth tarp in my scene.

Hah! I found an old render... the material above is on the tarp which lays crumpled on the floor.

The wardrobe is in my ShareCG album, if anybody wants to play with it. It could use updating.

 

[Pendraia]

What program are you using to change the scale GG?

 

[kobaltkween]

Just as an FYI, SVG is a vector format. It's vector objects described in XML. But you'd have to handle them as paths in Photoshop, or they'll get converted to bitmaps.

 

[Gadget Girl]

Okay, thanks all for the info, at least I now have a couple ways to go about this.

In Photoshop if you have it tiling via the Layer Style> Pattern Overlay you have a scaling slider..

Okay, found that option and it's dong a way better job that I was doing by hand, although I'm still getting a bit more pixelating than I want, so I'll have to look at refining the settings. On the other hand, I've learned a quicker way to do something I've been doing by hand, so that's awesome.

(In the first image that hole you are seeing is most likely due to half a Fleur de Lis being needed to tile there)

The hole in the first one was just that. That was just an image I grabbed that wasn't intended to be tiled, but it helped me fix an issue in my UV which you can see on the front where the fluers get their tops cut off and then just a point put back on.

If there's a compelling reason to using that approach, just disregard me, but you're using a P4 way of texturing. In Poser, you can use a single fleur de lis image of modest size, and tile it onto the cloth in the material room. It will retain excellent resolution at low cost in system resources. This would also allow you to selectively give only the the fleur de lis areas anisotropy and metallicity, as if they were embroidered onto the cloth with gold thread.
I would also tile the cloth, perhaps at a different scale.

Okay, this makes sense as a way to go about it and I tried, but it doesn't really seem to be doing better on the pixelation. Also I can't seem to stagger the images. Of course I could lay out 4 in another program and use that as an image map rather than the single one, but I feel like I should be able to do that using the U and V offset. Here's what I get though:

I tried setting the U and V offset to both higher and lower values and nothing seems to change. Do I need to plug some sort of math function into them?

What program are you using to change the scale GG?

My same image editor, (which is called Pixelmator but generally anything that can be done in photo shop can be done in it). Here's an example of how I've been doing it:

Although those are the default settings for the image. When I scale it down and up the pixels/inch it pixelates. Doesn't matter if I do it by typing in values, or by simply using a scaling box to adjust it till it looks like the right size.

Just as an FYI, SVG is a vector format. It's vector objects described in XML. But you'd have to handle them as paths in Photoshop, or they'll get converted to bitmaps.

That's what I was wondering. I know they are a different type of image file, I've been reading up on vector images, and it sounds great, but I worry it won't make a difference once I save out the final file as a .jpg or .png to use in Poser.

Can't help with the actual problem, but am so glad to see you are making a Barding for Harry. I have been looking for something like this for my Knights horses.

Thanks. It's fun to work on. And yes, he needs some good armor.

 

[Gadget Girl]

Okay, so I think I've gotten it figured out by using a variety of tequnices. First off, turns out there's a unicode character for the Fleur de Lis. I discovered this doing another image search, and it turned out that an easy way to keep my image from being pixelated was to start by using a character at a large font size and turning it into an image.

That being said, I'm still playing with some of the stuff @seachnasaigh was talking about, and I've come up with a pretty good cloth shader, at least for Superfly.

I may adjust my UV some more to avoid that seam you see. That's were two material zones meet, one for the collar, and one for the main front part.

Still if anyone else has any thoughts I'm more than happy to hear them, because I've learned a lot already from the comments people already posted.

 

[seachnasaigh]

@Gadget Girl That definitely looks better! Looks like you figured it out: make a fleur de lis with some space around it; the empty space gets tiled, just the fleur de lis gets tiled.

 

[Pendraia]

GG...given it was a vector image would rasterising it prior to scaling it help? I don't normally use vectors but I know that some tools in PS don't work unless you rasterise the layer first.

 

[Gadget Girl]

@Gadget Girl That definitely looks better! Looks like you figured it out: make a fleur de lis with some space around it; the empty space gets tiled, just the fleur de lis gets tiled.

Thanks. I actually didn't quite use your method to tile, I still ended up doing that in my image editor, but I did use your method to add better detail and make it look like fabric. And I'll remember for the next one to try putting more space around the image so I can tile that space.

GG...given it was a vector image would rasterising it prior to scaling it help? I don't normally use vectors but I know that some tools in PS don't work unless you rasterise the layer first.

I had to look up rasterizing but as it turned out I was doing it, except I found it worked better the other way. To scale, then rasterize. Got much less pixelation that way.

 

[Pendraia]

Fair enough...I couldn't remember which way round was better but that sounds right now that I've thought about it a bit more.