Spine to Unity detail loss

Alvaro_B

Hello,

I just noticed a loss in detail when exporting a spine animation to unity compared to what I am seeing in spine and a PNG of the object. The texture of the sequence is set to 4k in unity.

These are my export settings

This is the spine on unity

This is how it is intended to look

Any advise on how I could improve the detail of this object?
Thanks in advance

Misaki

Alvaro_B There doesn't seem to be anything particularly wrong with your texture packer settings.
As suggested by Spinebot, MipMap may be affecting the issue, but unfortunately, we cannot determine the exact cause based solely on the images provided. Could you please share some screenshots of the Texture and Material Inspector in Unity?

Spinebot

To improve the detail of your Spine animation when exporting to Unity, ensure that your export and import settings are correctly configured. Check that your atlas texture is exported with the appropriate settings, such as using the correct resolution and ensuring that the Premultiply Alpha (PMA) settings match between Spine and Unity. Additionally, verify that your Unity texture import settings are set to the highest quality, with the texture size set to 4k as you mentioned. Make sure that the texture compression is set to a high-quality format, and consider disabling mipmaps if they are not needed for your use case. Also, ensure that your camera settings in Unity are not affecting the perceived quality of the texture.

Alvaro_B

Yeah I thought the same, nothing crazy is done in the packer settings. And there is no Mipmap generation.

This is the texture used in the spine, its only one.

And the 2 materials.

Harald

@Alvaro_B In general it's hard to say based on slightly more blurry looking images. If you don't want linear interpolation of texels at all, you could change Filter Mode in Unity Texture Import Settings to Point.

You could also send us a minimal Unity project which shows your issue, plus the Spine project including the images directory. You can send it as a zip file to contact@esotericsoftware.com, briefly mentioning this forum thread URL so that we know the context.

Harald

@Alvaro_B Answering your questions from the email here so that others can also benefit from the insights.

[..] the problem I am having is not present between SkeletonAnimations and SkeletonGraphics but rather the Skelenton elements and PNGs exported from the same Spine file.

If you compare both elements, you can notice visual discrepancies in the level of detail. I believe (in my little experience with Spine) that a PNG file has a better level of detail because all the parts are flatten, while in the Skeleton elements the textures are packed in together, lowering the resolution of the image (maybe?).

No, atlas packing at scale 1.0 does not resample or scale-down the attachment image size, it creates an identical copy, potentially rotated if it fits better. If the output atlas size is configured to small, export would fail with an error message saying that. If you look at the exported atlas textures that are used in Unity, they all contain the properly sized images.

The difference is most likely due to your Spine Editor viewport Smoothing settings using either 0 for pixel art (equal to a nearest-neighbour or also called "point" filter on the Unity side) or having Keep edges enabled (the default) which will use a point-filter for transparent pixels. If in Unity you are using Bilinear filtering, you are smoothing the transparent pixels. As I said in my earlier posting above, just change your atlas textures Filter Mode to Point to get a similar behaviour.

This loss of detail is particularly troublesome because my target platform has
screens with a high pixel count, such as 2k or 4k. And to add context, in my game the spine elements are animated and then replaced with a PNGs of the same obj, like "turned off" so as to not draw any memory. They are supposed to seamlessly transition to one another.

I'm not sure if this is an additional issue, perhaps you mean different blending on the single-part skeleton vs. the still-image PNG of the same object. Please note that you should also use the same color space in Spine as in your Unity project. If you use Gamma space in Spine (the default), but Linear color space in Unity, you will receive different blending. You can then either change the Color Management setting in the Spine Editor or change the Unity project to use Gamma space.