Texture Atlas resolution?

Greg DAlessandro

A)Do texture atlas tend to cause textures to be closer to low res? (even at 1k or 2k)

B)Are texture atlas's typically used in "next gen" games? Or are they more for mobile devices?


I'm going to be making a city using modular assets, and I'm trying to figure out if it would be beneficial to use a texture atlas.

The environment will be a portfolio piece.

GlowingPotato

Atlas is a good practice in almost every case.

Atlas do not tend to look to be closer to low resolution, if it does, then you are down scaling your textures.

Atlas is widely used in every game generation. Some few reasons to use atlas is to reduce CPU overhead, by doing a lot less draw calls, its also reduce the GPU buffer swap.

Its a good practice to use texture atlas.

AdvisableRobin

If by next-gen you mean very high fidelity graphically then look into modular/tiling PBR textures and using procedural processes like Substance Designer.

Greg DAlessandro

But wouldn't shrinking down textures to fit into a texture atlas cause loss of detail within each of the textures?

GlowingPotato

Yourname942 wrote: »

But wouldn't shrinking down textures to fit into a texture atlas cause loss of detail within each of the textures?

not if you increase the atlas size to accommodate your textures inside.

For example, if you have four objects, and each object have three 1k textures maps (Diff, Nrm, Spec) you wold end with twelve 1k textures maps.

But you can use three 2k atlas texture to accommodate all your twelve 1k maps.

Each object still have a 1k texture resolution, but inside a 2k texture map along with other textures inside. Got it ?

seanacus

is it the done thing to add more geo to a poly plain (example) so you can splits its uvs and overlap them for more space on uv map or is there a better way (im using a texture sheet)