isn't enough for even half my model?

Hagroth

Hey,

I'm making a Viking ship, my first model, in 3ds max, and I thought I'd aim for the stars and go for a 8192x8192 UVW map since you can always scale it down. But now that I'm finished with the deck, it's turned out not even 8192x8192, which is extremely high according to most people, provides enough sharpness for me even though I've gone to extreme lengths at optimizing my UVW map. Most of it looks ok (considering it's supposed to be at a scale of about 6 meters/yards in width (this shows only half the ship, so three meters/yards), but in the bottom right, even though the "camera" or "view" is situated about half a yard/meter from the surface, it looks very blurry.

Just take a look at this picture, featuring the combination of my diffuse and spec level maps in 3ds max along with a view of the actual map in Photoshop:

http://i.imgur.com/xUCV0.jpg

And no, it's not that the original image I used to create the diffuse map was low-res, it's already scaled-down even on this 8192x8192 map.

So am I overlooking something? Should I make a 16384x16384 map? And this is just half of the ship's body, excluding the mast, sail etc.!

Thanks a lot in advance!

Joshua Stubbles

Look into texture atlasing and such. Basically a small portion of your texture is a tiling texture of wood. You then divide your geo in a way that each face, or a portion of those faces, get mapped to that wood part of the texture. So essentially you're tiling the texture, but with overlapping UV's.

You could make a very detailed ship with a 2048x2048, if you're clever about your UV usage and geometry splitting. An 8192 texture is really quite absurd, they're not used in game development - 4096x4096 is pushing it. A 1024 is pretty good sized for most objects and an 8192 texture is comprised of 64 of those 1024 textures. That's a lot of texture data.

BARDLER

The thing is with you are never going to find photos that have that resolution to fit into a map of that size. You can up the resolution of your texture all you want, but if you are bringing in photos that are like 2000x2000 roughly and up-scaling them then you are going to get fuzzy results. You say you didn't do that but I can clearly see on your texture flats the lack of detail in the photo, its completely blown out. Increasing your texture size isn't the solution, you need to lower it to a normal size and do not increase the size of the photos you bring in, or find better quality photos.

aivanov

Last I checked, Max's viewport doesn't allow textures to go beyond a certain size (512x512? 1024?) - so it automatically downscales anything bigger.

Besides that, 8192x8192 really is absurd. You can get away with a plenty crisp looking ship at 2048 using tips already mentioned. Look into previewing your textures in engines. Marmoset, maybe?

EarthQuake

Very generally you would never unique unwrap an asset this large, you would use a lot of tiling textures, with unique uvs only for smaller unique details.

AlexCatMasterSupreme

Yeah what earthquake said.

PogoP

Seeming as how most games tend to use 1024 or 2048 as a maximum texture size, I would reocmmend you don't use a 16384x16384 map...

Have you ever experimented with texture tiling? It's very simple and you could get a really nice wood texture for your ship on a simple 1024x1024 map, along with other materials on it as well.

Valandar

...umm...


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PROCEDURALS!


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Yeah, tiling, dude.

cptSwing

You could also try tiling parts of your texture?

almighty_gir

have you set max to display maps in viewport at their actual resolution? it's not set like that by default, so chances are you're seeing a downscaled image in the viewport rather than true res.

Hagroth

Thanks everybody!

All right, I'll just UVW-map parts that require more specific detail, like the dragon's head and things like that. I think I'll cut the deck into polygons so the planks are geometrically separated and assign them to different tiling textures out of the ten or so I'll create, using the multi sub-object materials approach. It all makes sense now, and I realize how silly 8192x8192 UVW-mapping is when there are other approaches.

Question is, how many different 1024 or 2048 materials is reasonable? It's a very large model in its future context.

And will this approach will be compatible with game engines? I was thinking of implementing my model into Skyrim later.

sprunghunt

Hagroth wrote: »

Question is, how many different 1024 or 2048 materials is reasonable? It's a very large model in its future context.

And will this approach will be compatible with game engines? I was thinking of implementing my model into Skyrim later.

It depends how much texture memory you have available among other things.

A single 1024 DXT1 is about 1mb of texture memory. So assuming you have 3 per complete texture then you could be looking at about 30 per 90mb. A ps3 has 256mb of video ram so assuming you only get a third of that for textures then 30 or so is a decent amount. Of course the xbox is different and so are PCs, iphones, dsis, psp, etc...

Hagroth

sprunghunt wrote: »

It depends how much texture memory you have available among other things.

A single 1024 DXT1 is about 1mb of texture memory. So assuming you have 3 per complete texture then you could be looking at about 30 per 90mb. A ps3 has 256mb of video ram so assuming you only get a third of that for textures then 30 or so is a decent amount. Of course the xbox is different and so are PCs, iphones, dsis, psp, etc...

Ah, never thought of it that way. No matter the approach, I should probably aim for about 30 MB then. I'm just wondering whether the engine just loads the textures for this memory space? I mean, would I be able to have like two textures, and then tile them however I want without affecting memory?

Neox

aivanov wrote: »

Last I checked, Max's viewport doesn't allow textures to go beyond a certain size (512x512? 1024?) - so it automatically downscales anything bigger.

Besides that, 8192x8192 really is absurd. You can get away with a plenty crisp looking ship at 2048 using tips already mentioned. Look into previewing your textures in engines. Marmoset, maybe?

when did you check this, in 1990?
there is an option for using the maximum res since like forever.

SirCalalot

I think my laptop would faint at even the mention of a 8192x8192 texture within 10 feet of it.

Scruples

Just keep in mind, 30mb of image files on disc may not equal 30mb of video memory.
It does get complicated but as a general rule, a 1024x1024 Dxt1 texture with mipmapping (increases size by a third) will use 4.2MB of video memory and only 682kb of disc space.

Dxt5 1024x1024 w/mipmaps which is used mostly for normal maps and textures containing an alpha and uses 11.1MB of video memory and only 1.33mb of disc space.

If you feel like reading about it, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression

So, if my math is right we can fit roughly twenty 1024x1024 size dxt1 maps on a third of ps3's video memory (85mb).

Hagroth

SirCalalot wrote: »

I think my laptop would faint at even the mention of a 8192x8192 texture within 10 feet of it.

Scruples wrote: »

Just keep in mind, 30mb of image files on disc may not equal 30mb of video memory.
It does get complicated but as a general rule, a 1024x1024 Dxt1 texture with mipmapping (increases size by a third) will use 4.2MB of video memory and only 682kb of disc space.

Dxt5 1024x1024 w/mipmaps which is used mostly for normal maps and textures containing an alpha and uses 11.1MB of video memory and only 1.33mb of disc space.

If you feel like reading about it, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression

So, if my math is right we can fit roughly twenty 1024x1024 size dxt1 maps on a third of ps3's video memory (85mb).

Thank you, my model is intended for the PC version (since mods can't be done for consoles anyway), so I've got some freedom at least. But of course I have to draw the line somewhere. Judging by your post, would you say that apart from the geometry itself (the polygons), what's significantly loaded into the video memory are the textures themselves, not so much how they're used. I mean, would I be able to have a set amount of textures, and then tile them however I want without affecting video memory usage?

Ah, mipmapping. That's what causes an engine to render objects with less detailed textures when viewed at a distance isn't it? As far as I know, I'll probably use the diffuse, spec level, maybe glossy and normal/bump maps. Is mipmapping a commonly used technique I should learn in case I want to put the ship inside a game engine like Skyrim's? I haven't seen the feature inside 3ds max at all. Anyway, that's probably not to be concerned of at the moment since I'll try to focus on getting the ship done. Having it inside a game is just one of the intended uses.

Scruples

Sounds like you are going to need mipmaps eventually, and they are created rather easily when converting your textures to .dds but that can be done whenever you want, (checking an option box if you are using nvidia texture tools) .Without it textures at distances look like sandpaper, moire effects become visible, and shimmering can be noticed. They also reduce the amount of work a videocard has to do in a similar way to a lod (although primarily fillrate).

The amount of tiles you use will also affect fillrate, but I really wouldn't worry about it as long as the tiles contribute to the visual quality and remain relatively consistent in density across the mesh (no toothpicks using tree textures). But I don't think tiling affects memory usage at all...any render monkeys know? if it does it has to be minute.

fearian

I want to say this as well, because its the visible problem that OP is having:

8k is probably TOO large, max isn't displaying an 8k map, it's displaying a much scaled down version. This is why it looks 'too small'.

Scruples

fearian wrote: »

I want to say this as well, because its the visible problem that OP is having:

8k is probably TOO large, max isn't displaying an 8k map, it's displaying a much scaled down version. This is why it looks 'too small'.

It's like you didn't read the thread.

Hagroth

Scruples wrote: »

Sounds like you are going to need mipmaps eventually, and they are created rather easily when converting your textures to .dds but that can be done whenever you want, (checking an option box if you are using nvidia texture tools) .Without it textures at distances look like sandpaper, moire effects become visible, and shimmering can be noticed. They also reduce the amount of work a videocard has to do in a similar way to a lod (although primarily fillrate).

The amount of tiles you use will also affect fillrate, but I really wouldn't worry about it as long as the tiles contribute to the visual quality and remain relatively consistent in density across the mesh (no toothpicks using tree textures). But I don't think tiling affects memory usage at all...any render monkeys know? if it does it has to be minute.

All right, thanks. I got a great reply regarding Skyrim in specific here from the user ghosu in case anyone's interested: http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/803117-texturing-approach-used-in-skyrim/
(The second last post on that page.)

He went into the Skyrim Contruction Kit and shows how they did it in Skyrim.