Need help understanding isometry, pixels per unit and camera size

Questions & Answers
1

Hi. I trying to make a grid based isometric game (look at Invisible Inc. for comparison).

However it’s not true isometry. I rotate camera 45° on Y axis and 30° on X axis and move it by -10, 10, -10.

That way i can make sprites which base (floor) can be a rhombus with width to height ratio of 2:1. And I’m not doing pixel art, but high resolution sprites (width at least 1024 pixels).

Then I’m placing my sprites on a grid, in which one square is 1x1 unit on X and Z. I’m rotating my sprites to face the camera.

And now all i have to do is to set sprite Pixels Per Unit to sprite width/sqrt(2), because that way a sprite will fit in diagonal of one grid square. And it has to fit on diagonal, because it’s rotated towards camera.

Now all should be fine and good, but there is one problem. The sprites are very bad quality and are pixelated, probably due to this that they are small in camera compared to their real pixel size. My camera size is 5. So what should i do to:

  • Have a grid width 1x1 unit squares on X and Z axis (eventually i can make this grid bigger, but 1x1 is the simplest)
  • Fit around 10 to 15 grid squares in width on screen in 16:9
  • Have sprites in high resolution and looking good?

Edit: Screenshot of in game sprites and sprite from file: Sprite Problem - Album on Imgur

**Edit 2: I turned on mip maps and it’s looking better but how to get rid of this gaps between tiles? MipMaps - Album on Imgur **

2

Okay, so, here’s the problem: When you don’t use mipmaps, Unity downsamples the large texture, which often leads to speckling or odd pixelation, which you’ve seen. When you allow Unity to generate mipmaps, it will, but it just downsamples them ahead of time, which can produce unwanted effects, particularly with edges like you’ve seen.

So, what you’re going to want to do is manually define your mipmaps. You should save a copy of the tile in it’s original resolution, and then every half-resolution from there down. For example, if the original tiles are 2048x2048, then you’ll need to define 1024x1024, 512x512, 256x256, 128x128, 64x64, 32x32, etc. depending on how far out you plan to allow the player to zoom. This way you can control the quality at all levels and maintain edge uniformity. When you import the texture, you’ll want to apply these mipmaps (see here). That should allow you to control the quality of the tiles at all zoom levels.