Why is my texture in Unity of poor quality at a distance?

This is how she sees the camera

This is how she is in the scene

Texture settings

Project settings

It also looks like your Game view is zoomed in, which would make it pixelated.

programmer answer

  1. Your texture is 2048/1024 resolution
  2. This camera renders to, lets say, a 1900/1200 output resolution

Can you spot a problem here?

Yes. The problem is that these pixels can barely fit on full screen if you seriously zoom in. Illusion of sub-pixel detail is possible, but only to an extent and is limited by mipmaps (for good reasons).

artist answer

Experienced artist realized that hi-frequency detail (tiny shapes) is less important than low-frequency one (big shapes and gradients) and when accompanied by high contrast (like in your case) creates, contrary to intuition, a more blurry final pixels on screen.
What is more - screen-space contrast guides perception, and making objects high-contrast telegraphs to the player that given object is important. Making everything high-contrast will induce confusion not awe.

Do a experiment, create these textures:

  • high-contrast, black & white (TV-like) noise
  • a color gradients
  • bunch of big shapes (can be high-contrast as well)

and observe which textures look better with distance. After drawing conclusions you may want to redo the texture.


But don’t believe me. Take a look at some of the best looking bottles in a game rn:

Notice that small details (like text and tiny shapes) are suspiciously low-contrast?

And high-contrast shapes (bottle on the right) is mostly big shapes all the sudden…