let's talk about sextures... i mean textures =)

jehuty

hello guys,

i have a quastion:
when you are makeing textures or going to make one... are you immediatly working in the final size of the texture or do you make for example a 1024x1024 texture that would be finaly a 512x512 texture. i mean for all the detail stuff going on in there... but i figur the it is also alot of wasted energy to do so... you make many details and at the end you scale it down and lose most of it again... well how do you handle that? especially you guys in the gameindustry...?!
thanks in advance

Wells

damn, i thought it said sectaurs.

http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/resize.htm

poop's the man.

NuclearTes

I always texture at the actual resolution. The end result is more predictable that way (like poop says in his tutorial) and I'm too lazy to work at a double resolution anyway.

smurfbizkit

I perfer working at double, whenever I try to work at the actual resolution the lines seem much larger than I'd like them to be. When I shrink it down, I typically sharpen areas so that it doesn't have that blurred look.

kleinluka

i usually work in the final resolution. More predictable and more control over how the final piece looks like. I don't like shrinking my art down, and sharpen is evil.

I pet poop btw.

KDR_11k

Usually final but currently I'm working on something without finalized specs so I go with the largest size I could imagine it to use and will shrink it down once the specs are set.

Rick Stirling

I work larger, because I often work on multiple platforms at the same time.

Scott Ruggels

work huge, and then reduce and hand compress. But then I hate painting textures anyway...

Scott

melkior

I go at least double the final res. In part because some of my work may be used on more than one platform or specs and upscaling is much harder than downscaling. Sometimes you have to sharpen up an edge or two when you downscale it but most of the time I design with that in mind and its very minimal.

It also makes detailing easier in my opinion.

heres a recent example of my output, skinned at 1024x1024 resampled down to 512x512

http://studio-erebus.com/studio/pcnw/nw-female-solo-2.jpg

Steve Schulze

It depends what I'm doing it for. If it a texture of a reasonable size, then I'll work true res. If its for a hand held, its easier to work double and then resize. painting directly on to a 128*128 texture is just too small for me. The resulting blur can actually work to your advantage if you're doing certain things. Otherwise its just a matter of doing a quick touch up afterwards. Still simpler than trying to do the whole lot on a tiny canvas.

Snowfly

I work at the maximum res. Usually at 1024, sometimes a little bigger (2000x2000). Scaling down is all good because even if some details disappear, the impression of that detail is still conveyed well enough, except in extreme cases, ie 1024 > 128

malcolm

Depends on the game I am working on, but right now I work at 4 times the final resolution, so I work at 1024x512 and scale down to 512x256, then sharpen the texture 100% and the difference between the scaled down version is not noticeable at all in game. It depends on the art I think, last year on SSX3 we painted all the textures for the objects at destination scale only because you have to whip that stuff out really quick and because the final result is very small and also 4bit in almost every case. I think the artist that did the terrain textures worked at a bigger resolution to start off with. For environment textures I generally find starting bigger and scaling down achieves a better looking final result than pixel painting as you don't limit your artistic skill by using 1 pixel brushes that appear 3 pixels big on your model. I also use photographes heavily and try to do as little actually painting as possible, again depending on what type of game you are making since most of our games call for a photorealistic style textures.

jehuty

thanks very much for all your answers... i have to make up my own opinion out of these replys... thank you for the great help...