Texture map general rules?

mobkon

Hi all -

I'm making a small scene that I plan to import into Marmoset. It consists of a few objects - trash can, garbage bag, boxes and cans. Should I be trying to fit all these assets on one texture map? Whats the rule with this? Obviously the larger objects should have more real estate/resolution on the texture map, but should I just make one large 4K map and fit everything or should I do separate 2k maps for each larger object and fit the smaller objects where I can?

In general, since these are all separate assets that would normally be used in a game engine on their own, shouldn't each object have its own separate texture map anyway? Why is it I often see scenes that have multiple objects on one texture map?

Thanks for the help guys! This has been buggin me!

EarthQuake

Generally separate objects will have separate textures. The only real exception to this is if all the objects will always be seen together, then its ok to pack them on the same uvlayout. Like a modular building set or a set of tools that will be seen together or something like that.

Chimp

Well, quite often you'll want to essentially atlas yourself - it can be a big performance gain especially on mobile (although it was quite common for last gen consoles too) - so yeah having a lot of stuff on one texture can be rather useful but you can go too far where you have super large textures causing hitches.

Generally I max out at about 2k.

There's other things to consider though, like needing particular shaders for particular things - ramming it all onto one texture means that everything is going to use the same shader which might limit you art wise but also might limit you performance wise, perhaps some objects want to use a faster shader because they don't need to be lit or whatever.

It's a balancing act really and something that depends entirely on your game, your engine and your programmer.