Hello everyone, I would like to better understand texel density and how to maintain it in a scene.
What blocks me is that I understand how it works, with the various mathematical formulas, even how many times to tile a texture, but then I can’t find a practical reference when I try to maintain texel density for an entire scene in 3ds Max. I've always used a visual reference, both for props and modular kits, but while the theory is fine, as soon as I try to apply it to an asset, I can't seem to find the right balance.
In my project, I want to maintain a texel density of 1024/m or 10.24/cm. For example, I have a dungeon door, and I create a proxy box that measures approximately 140cm x 24cm x 246cm. I calculate the total surface area, which is 87,408 square cm. I calculate the square root, which comes out to 295.65 cm², and then I calculate 10.24 × 295.65 = 3027.46.
And this is where I get lost. Since I’m using 3ds Max, there's no real tool for texel density, so I use a script I found online. But the problem is that when I set that texel density on my UV islands, they become huge and obviously don’t fit into the 0-1 space. If I set the texel density to 1024 and compare the door with the reference plane of one square meter with a 1024 checkerboard map, the texel density matches, but again, the UV islands are too large to fit in the 0-1 space.
I'm lost and I don’t understand how to maintain texel density in an entire scene with dozens of objects. I could use tiling textures and trims, but I wouldn’t be able to get the level of detail I want on the individual assets, unless I use UDIMs. But since these are theoretically game-ready assets, I know that's not ideal, and it’s not what I want to do anyway. So, where am I going wrong? I feel incredibly stupid.
Replies
you have three options
1: make a material that supports tiling detail and unique masking - either through textures or vertex color (or both)
2: be clever with UVs - make use of tiling/trim sheets, re-use texture space etc.
3: do both of those things
also:
You definitely don't need to use just one material per object - if you're targeting something with shit batching like unreal then it is beneficial to use as few materials as possible but if something is large enough to mean you can't UV it using a 2k texture, it's probably large enough to warrant using more than one material
Texture size isn't as big an issue as people think provided you have an engine with robust texture streaming (something unreal does very well - especially with virtual textures)