Hi everyone. I have a very basic question regarding the quality of image textures.
I have a 360° panoramic image, rendered in another application, which i want to use in houdini as texture on a half-sphere.

So far, i got it working with principled shader (base color texture) and a uvproject sop.

But, no matter how high the resolution of my image is (4k/8k), if you zoom in a little, the texture on the sphere has big staircase artifacts.

Would be very glad if someone could help me to improve the quality of my textured sphere.
Thank you, Markus

Which renderer? Does it have these artifacts in Mantra?

Yes, it is with mantra. I guess at least in the viewport, the texture should “look” as detailed as the original “texture.png” but even if i project it on a 16x9 grid a lot of detail gets lost with my setup…
Maybe it is a limitation by indie license?

It looked fine to me in a mantra render. The texture in the viewport would be limited by the display settings for that scene viewer. The default texture limit is probably 1024 or 2048 or some such. I don't consider viewport display quality to be important, so I leave it at the defaults. If you have a need to increase the texture resolution limit, you could give that a try, and see if it helps. Mantra refers to the raytracing/pbr/micropoly engine for rendering final images, not the interactive scene viewer panel. The the scene viewer uses opengl and is meant to help see what your are making before you render it out, or export it to the next user in your pipeline. If you need the gl render as a final product, it may be worth looking over the viewer quality settings.

Thanks for your help, jsmack. After wrapping my head around it once more i now understand the cause for my issues. Maybe my last post was a little misleading because i actually need the mantra render as final output.
Since the Indie render output is max 1920x1080, the texture on the dome (which only has a percentage amount of this resolution available on the final render) would be downscaled and thus, of course, looses detail from the original source. So i guess the only option would be to render bigger images with a full license.
These renders will be projected/beamed on a real dome by 10mtr diameter and artifacts can unfortunately be seen much better then at large scale…
Thanks again for your help! markus