Best resolution for portraits for use in Unity? 1000px or 1024px square? Scaling down?

waronmars

Hey guys, I am drawing a bunch of portraits with the intention to sell them on the Unity asset store down the track, just wondering if it would be better to create them at 1024px square or just go ahead using 1000px square as I originally intended. I know textures are better to be 1024 but would it matter for portraits?

One more thing, I am going to be scaling them down to 250px square for use in a different program. Does 1000px scale down to 250px more cleanly than 1024?

Cheers

Mink

All texture files should, when used in engine, have to have resolutions that scale at powers of 2.

HaukeThiessen

Mink said:

All texture files should, when used in engine, have to have resolutions that scale at powers of 2.

That's actually not really relevant for UI textures, since there is no need for mip-maps. But I would still recommend using powers of two when it doesn't interfere with other requirements, so that you don't have to remember the size of every texture you are using.

Farfarer

HaukeThiessen said:

Mink said:

All texture files should, when used in engine, have to have resolutions that scale at powers of 2.

That's actually not really relevant for UI textures, since there is no need for mip-maps. But I would still recommend using powers of two when it doesn't interfere with other requirements, so that you don't have to remember the size of every texture you are using.

The textures will still take up the next power of two size in video memory though (a 1000 pixel square image takes up the VRAM of 1024 pixel square image) so you might as well use the full power of two texture.

Different hardware may also do different things to store it in VRAM, too, so you're better off authoring it at power of two dimensions to not hit those (some might upscale it to 1024 in a way you don't want, others won't scale it but you'll pay a performance penalty for uploading/fetching a texture that doesn't fit nicely into VRAM, although most modern desktop hardware will probably be OK with storing it as-is).

Mip maps don't have anything to do with power of two dimensions - it's to do with memory allocation.

RyanB

You can pack all of your NPOT (non-power of two) UI sprites in Unity.  This forces them onto a sprite sheet that is power of two which allows you to compress them.  NPOT textures cannot be compressed.

Select your textures, set the texture type to Sprite (2D and UI) in the Import Settings tab.  In the import settings tab, there is a packing tag text box.  Enter a name for each of your packs in here.  You can have multiple packs. For example, you could select all of your portraits, enter the name "PACK_Portraits" in the packing tag and now they are all on a power-of-two sprite sheet.