Pixelated textures when using Automation Toolkit - 16 bit?

[Choix]

Hello,

I'm using the Automation Toolkit to produce variations of texures.

My problem: whenever I'm using a position map input for any node when exporting the textures everything produced by that node is pixelated (e.g. dirt). This seems to be a problem with the position map not being 16 bit but I've checked it and it is 16 bit. Do I have to care for anything else?

Inside Substance everything looks good and not pixelated but as soon as I export via script it becomes.

Best regards,
Choix

[Cyrille Damez]

It is likely because sbsrender is using a CPU engine rather than a GPU engine. With the CPU engines, 16 bit color textures are not supported and fall back to 8 bit (and conversely 8 bit greyscale texture fallback to 16bits). You can switch to use a GPU engine using the --engine command line option (ogl3 or d3d10pc depending on your OS).

[Choix]

It is likely because sbsrender is using a CPU engine rather than a GPU engine. With the CPU engines, 16 bit color textures are not supported and fall back to 8 bit (and conversely 8 bit greyscale texture fallback to 16bits). You can switch to use a GPU engine using the --engine command line option (ogl3 or d3d10pc depending on your OS).

Thank you very very much, that was exactly it.

Do you know how I can find out what the correct command line option is to use the external graphics card? It works with d3d10pc but really slow and it can't find ogl3. My apologies if this is a noob question but I'm really not familiar with this.

[Cyrille Damez]

If you are on Windows, only Direct3D10 is available for the GPU engine. If you are on MacOS or Linux, only OpenGL is available.
Anyway, the Direct3D10 version of the engine is the fastest we currently have (and it should be faster than the CPU engine, unless you have an awful lot of CPU cores or a very low end GPU).
What GPU model are you using it with ? If you have both a discrete and an integrated GPU (e.g. on a laptop), make sure you are using the discrete GPU. Which GPU is used can be set for each application using your GPU vendor's control panel.