Mip Maps on UI Sprites? Good or bad?

Unity Engine
1

For 3D textures, I believe it’s generally better to turn on mip maps for performance reasons and for looks when viewing from far distances. Does this also apply for mip maps on sprites in the new UI?

In the old OnGUI UI system and in the even older GUIText/GUITexture system, there was no such things as mip maps, but every time I import a new image in the new UI in 4.6 I keep seeing a “Generate Mip Maps” checkbox.

Will generating mip maps for sprites help/hurt performance? Will they affect how good/bad the UI looks?

Thanks,
Arka M.

1 Like
2

In general they make it look worse, especially if you’re using bordered sprites. You should probably just use it with 3D stuff, or very large images.

2 Likes
3

Thanks, just wanted to make sure I was doing everything correctly :).

4

I have been turning Mipmaps on, as it seems to look better at various resolutions. I think turning it off, you have to make it pixel perfect to the screen size. I try to design all my interfaces to scale from iPhone to iPad to Full screen desktop and Mipmap seems to work better for me.

1 Like
5

We turn them all off for every art asset as they look bad and mess some things up. This might have to do with the fact that we have 3 assets for each image (HD,UD,SD) which we hot swap based on the device.

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6

Be nice if when creating a project in 2D…the Mipsmaps setting was off by default, or these settings could be set in the Prefs. Having to do it over and over is a drag. Like Audio files, far more likely to not be ‘3D’ than to be.

7

You can fix this pretty easily by extending the AssetPostprocessor class. In there you can choose how assets are imported.

http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AssetPostprocessor.OnPostprocessTexture.html