Texel Density

jesselarson

Trying to understand texel density better. I don't come from a game background, so this is still relatively new to me. I'm working on a scene and decided I wanted everything to be 2048 texel density throughout. My first object to UV was a cannon and I split it up over two texture sets, one for wood, one for metal. I ran into two issues and was hoping to get some help with it.

The first is that there's a bunch of unused UV space. How is that typically dealt with in games? Is it par for the course? Do I include other assets to fill it out? It just seems like a waste. It's more of a hero asset, so I didn't double up islands.

The second issue was that while I liked the uniformity of having everything set at 2048, some pieces were coming through a bit soft in Painter. Specifically, the loops on the sides, and the flintlock mechanism on top. My solution was to double the UV island size for those pieces, but that broke the 2048 resolution I was going for. Was that "wrong" to do and should I stringently stick to whatever resolution I choose (or am given in a work environment), or is it ok to be purposfully flexible so long as the resolution is still close?

Thanks for any help with this.

sprunghunt

I'd definitely consider doubling up some of the mesh shells. Even for a hero asset this is considered normal in games. I'd at the very least mirror the wheels. 

poopipe

You basically have to suck up the wasted texture space if you want consistent density. 

Its perfectly fine to increase the size of bits if they look too fuzzy

The only reason to mirror or overlap bits is it will allow you to use a smaller texture - eg if you could go from 2048*2048 to 1024*2048
Otherwise you might as well take advantage of the space and add variation.


Generally speaking if you're working on a game you'll have several related assets in a set and you're fighting to find space for them all on your texture pages so wasted space isn't much of an issue and you'll be overlapping stuff all over the place anyway

jesselarson

That's great info. Thanks for the help.

gnoop

I would still prioritize  some areas and downscale islands of low priority.  inner parts of two wheels . Two if you want them different. Inner and bottom part of gun carriage.    The uv pack could also be much tighter with modern packers and not necessarily square .

It also depends a lot on whether you are going to use AO textures . If you do you are very much limited to re-use same textures in different places and you can basically forget about perfectly equal texel size .

  With all those impostors  and  floating point textures  with packed animation  this days it's never enough texture space.  Well, for PC projects at least if you want them run on mass variety of public laptops and low priced pc.