Aniso Level <-> Generate Mip Maps for Sprites

2D
1

Hello Unity Community,

really confused right now - I am making a 2D mobile game and imported a spritesheet in unity (Unity 5.5, Win10 x64). When I unset the tick for “Generate Mip Maps” for the sprite and start the game, the object that use sprites from that spritesheet look “choppy”/ pixelated - i think the term for that is aliased. Looks really ugly!

But when I check “Generate Mip Maps” for the spritesheet, I see the Aniso Level appearing in the Import Settings window and is preset to 16. When I apply the settings, the sprites look really awesome, as they should! (anti-aliased, seems like color interpolation for each pixel is “turned on”)

As far as I know, Mip Maps are used for 3D textures - to make additional sprites/textures of the original one, which add 30% more memory used.

As I am not good in graphics and don’t have the deep knowledge behind all the settings, I will put my question as simply as it’s possible - how can I let my sprites look anti-aliased, without generating Mip Maps or at least to reduce the Aniso Level for the sprites in the Import Settings?

Thanks for any response!

P.S. When I try to lower the Aniso Level manually and apply the settings - it is reset to 16 again.

2

Mip maps are for displaying textures at a scale smaller than the screen resolution allows. ie: If your sprite is 100 pixels wide, but it’s being displayed on screen using only 50 pixels, this will look aliased with out mip maps. This is referred to as minification.

3

Thanks for explaination @bgolus ! Do you know can I set the Aniso Level to a custom value, not 16?

4

No, I don’t know why it would be getting stuck at 16. It’s possible it’s forced on in the project’s quality settings? I don’t do much with sprites ever so there might be something specific there, but I couldn’t tell you, sorry.