Problems with map display...

I spent a total of about 4 hours trying to find out why my map wasn't displaying properly.
Turns out there was nothing wrong with my code, or my shader, the problem was in the imprecision of the floating point numbers used to scale the UVs and the default use of sRGB color space by blender.

(top left) This is similar to what I was getting, obviously not right, but I couldn't figure out why.
(top right) Using data from the map each square is given a red color from 0-255.
(bottom left) There are 16 possible arrangements of tile and the red color offsets the UVs of that tile by a set amount.
(bottom right) The rather unimpressive final base result.

When scaling UVs Blender avoids imprecision in floating point number by just rounding up to a more suitable number, so 0.0625 becomes 0.063. This is fine usually, as you don't really care about pixel perfect placement in most applications. But when your total image is only 32 pixels across it can cause issues as 1 divided by 16 is NOT 0.063! Easy to solve, I had to add a second modifier after the offset to correct the rounding. But I didn't even know about this problem until I had solved the second one...

Blender uses sRGB color space by default. This is fine as nearly every application does these days. But the above method relies on linear color distribution, each color must map exactly to its true value or the offset will be wrong. This was solved by switching color management for the offending texture to simple RGB color space. Sadly the setting for this is hidden away in a collapsed tab in the texture settings, so I only thought about it after a lot of time wasted modifying code and testing other solutions.

So finally, the map display works. However... I'm not sure I like the result. :(
It's great that I solved the problem though as I can use this method in Vinland 1936 for texturing the terrain.

Comments

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