Is texture padding important?

Worldevour

I'm not much of a fan of texture paddings especially if my uvs are very close to each other. Is texture padding nowadays a thing? I most of the time paint my object on 3d texturing programs. I think texture padding is pretty much usefull only when texturing in 2d programs.

Should i use texture padding?

Obscura

Texture edge padding is used to make the edges not having color bleeding from neightbour pixels, when the texture gets mip mapped.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Edge_padding

Using a few pixels wide padding is highly recommended in all cases, but it also doesn't hurt to have it infinite...You know...

zachagreg

Why are you not a fan of texture padding? What are you doing to your textures that padding gets in the way that much?

gvii

Texture padding is absolutely necessary when your texture is getting reduced in size according to distance from camera. It's not a matter of personal preference; It's a necessity. Otherwise when your texture shrinks it will grab neighbor pixels in the shells and have unwanted colors appearing all throughout the model.

Worldevour

zachagreg said:

Why are you not a fan of texture padding? What are you doing to your textures that padding gets in the way that much?

I'm not a fan because when two islands are very close to each other, it gets more difficult to distinguish the edges of the islands.

Thanks for your answers. 

rexo12

Worldevour said:

zachagreg said:

Why are you not a fan of texture padding? What are you doing to your textures that padding gets in the way that much?

I'm not a fan because when two islands are very close to each other, it gets more difficult to distinguish the edges of the islands.

Thanks for your answers. 

Surely this isn't going to be an issue if you just pad your textures after you've finished editing them? It's only necessary for the engine, not in production. Or do you mean in terms of editing baked maps? 

zachagreg

rexo12 said:

Worldevour said:

zachagreg said:

Why are you not a fan of texture padding? What are you doing to your textures that padding gets in the way that much?

I'm not a fan because when two islands are very close to each other, it gets more difficult to distinguish the edges of the islands.

Thanks for your answers. 

Surely this isn't going to be an issue if you just pad your textures after you've finished editing them? It's only necessary for the engine, not in production. Or do you mean in terms of editing baked maps? 

FourtyNights

Let's assume that you're going to use Marmoset Toolbag 3 for baking and Substance Painter for texturing. When baking in MT3, it's advisable to bake with "infinite" (extreme setting) edge padding/dilation for better mipmapping. Bringing baked maps with proper edge padding for SP also helps to work in its viewport with mipmapping, therefore you're not going to see nasty seaming appearing on the 3D model when zoomed away with the camera.

When you're texturing in SP, its 2D viewport shows textures you're working on without padding to see edges of the UV island more clear (that's what you were worried about). Once you're done with texturing, apply the infinite padding for the final outputted textures when exporting them out of SP.

So in conclusion... YES, use edge padding. Always. Mipmapping is important.

Thanez

Worldevour said:

zachagreg said:

Why are you not a fan of texture padding? What are you doing to your textures that padding gets in the way that much?

I'm not a fan because when two islands are very close to each other, it gets more difficult to distinguish the edges of the islands.

Thanks for your answers. 

Do you mean that when you apply textures to the UVs, the seams pop up? Instead of applying textures in UV space, you can use triplanar projection to add the textures to your model, that'll hide all the seams.

gvii

You should always have your UV snapshot in a layer if you are working on your textures in a 2d program. That would remedy whatever confusion bleeding might bring. Maybe go 0 dilation/padding while working and add the dilation at the end of the process.