Making sense of texel size in game textures

treefiddy

Hi guys, new guy in the game asset world.
Ive been struggling  with understanding two pieces of advice ive gotten
Maximising UV space, and keeping a consistent texel size. It seems impossible to keep a consistent texel size throughout the game while not wasting UV space.

What am i supposed to do here?
The wall and the lightswitch has the same texel size. the wall being 2k and the outlet 512px map respectively. The problem is there is a lot of unused UV space.



edit: links to courses explaining these things is also very much appreciated

Shuma

Your outlet UVs use only 1/4 th of the height of your map, make it use the all UV space and use a 128 px map (512/4). It will make the same textel density with less maps. Consistent texel size + Maximizing UV space = less map = Less memory

gnoop

Don't make a dogma of those rules.   A  little bit  smaller texel size in key details could actually be an advantage . Especially with limited texture budget , environment stuff .     Exactly this outlet for example.   

 Just  keep it consistent for things using same detail layer scaling in the shader

poopipe

There's no secret,  we often waste texture space in order to keep density consistent

sprunghunt

For something small like that I’d try to combine it with a larger texture. For example; you could make a texture atlas that has wall baseboards, cornices, outlets, light switches, and other wall pieces on it. Then they can fill up the empty space on the texture. This can also cut down drawcalls.