down-scaling textures. How do you manage to do it?

No Pie For You!

hello, i have a problem, that probably was argued a few times here.

I made a shuriken for bh, made high res - low res models, made his texture transfer and bakes. However, regardless what i try, the importer always scales down the textures to that default 256x128 size, turning my texture work into crap. I know downscalling turns everything to pixels but, somehow you guys manage to do it.

How do you guys manage to maintain your textures so high-res when importing?

Right now, my textures are 4x bigger (1024x512) than the slot requirement (256x128)
I tried importing with .PSD and .TGA; both at x4 size, and downscaled versions, but the result is the same (pictures: 1 what importer imports, 2 low res texture, 3 high res texture).


Am i missing something? some help would be greatly appreciated.
If there is already a discussed thread on this subject, could someone give me  a pointer?
I forgot to say that i use 3DSmax and Muddbox for all my modeling, painting, exporting.

No Pie For You!

A quick update. I have scrolled around this forum and some scarce info i could find on the internet here and there, and i think i found my problem:
texture space. it`s under used.
This means i have to redo my unwraping and texture space allocation.
Did i miss anything else?

RossC

No Pie For You! said:

A quick update. I have scrolled around this forum and some scarce info i could find on the internet here and there, and i think i found my problem:
texture space. it`s under used.
This means i have to redo my unwraping and texture space allocation.
Did i miss anything else?

No, you got it!  Texture space, especially in something like Dota is incredibly important.  This is why symmetry is so useful, it lets you basically use twice the texture space!  Consider making that ring part completely symmetrical.  Generally, you want the stuff that will be the most visible to have the biggest UV islands, and the stuff that's less visible to have smaller UV islands.  The bigger the UV island, the less blurry and undefined it'll appear in game.

No Pie For You!

I reworked my texture spaces and it seems to be working just fine. I sacrificed a lot of small details though for the more space saving symetry. I still think i can sqeeze even more here and there, but i think i will do this without bugging the forum anymore, and just post the final result on my forum page. Cheers to Ross for the more detailed overview.