Issue 287Surface Authoring1024 × 1024 sRGBAutumn Calibration
The checker never lies
about your seams.
Texel Quarterly is a field manual for people who unwrap things. This issue: reading distortion by eye, four quadrant markers that survive mirroring, and why the alpha channel is where most pipelines quietly fall apart.
U0 V1 · NW
U1 V1 · NE
U0 V0 · SW
U1 V0 · SE
Channel inspection
Isolate a single plane and the board re-renders in place. Distortion that hides inside a composite becomes obvious the moment you drop three channels.
Shell audit — asset crane_boom_a
Every shell measured against a 512 px/m target density. Anything drifting past ±12% gets kicked back to layout before it reaches the bake queue.
| Shell | Texels/m | Drift | Seams | Overlap | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| boom_upper | 512.0 | +0.0% | 4 | none | Pass |
| boom_lower | 498.3 | −2.7% | 6 | none | Pass |
| pulley_housing | 441.8 | −13.7% | 11 | none | Repack |
| cable_drum | 608.5 | +18.8% | 3 | 2 faces | Reject |
| operator_cab | 515.2 | +0.6% | 9 | none | Pass |
| counterweight | 503.7 | −1.6% | 2 | none | Pass |
| hydraulic_set | 466.1 | −9.0% | 18 | none | Repack |
- Note 01Mirror your shells only after the quadrant markers read correctly. A mirrored NE marker in the NW slot means the shell flipped, not the camera.
- Note 02Stretch shows up in the checker as rectangles, never as squares. If you can measure the aspect by eye, the packer already lost.
- Note 03Keep a 4-texel gutter at 512 px/m. Anything tighter bleeds through the first mip and no amount of dilation saves it.
- Note 04The alpha plane is not decoration. Inspect it before every bake — coverage errors are invisible in composite.