Simple Texture Question

armagon9177

Hi. I recently started some serious texture work for static meshes for a custom
ut2004 map. Ive worked with max / maya but this is my first time diving into game

art.i was wondering what the purpose of palettising your colors for textures is all

about? Ive seen it done here and there on tutorials. Is it mainly a performance

issue with the size of your textures or a personal preference to get them to match

better? I havent been very conscientious about what colors im using thus far. Am i

in trouble or just worrying about nothing. Thanks for indulging a newb. hahah

Snowfly

when working on devices with limited color displays, you're palettizing to choose which colors appear on screen. if you only have 16 to work with, you want to choose carefully. if you have 256, you have a little more freedom but you still want to be careful... for screens with 16-bit color depth and above, you can pretty much go crazy.

now it's all about making the most of texture memory. i.e. the tradeoff between 1 24-bit texture, or 3-4 8-bit textures, especially for levels. there's a lot you can do with 8-bit images, depending on what you want the texture to have. :-)

as far as stressing over what colors include, there's no need, as most apps do a good job of palettizing images.

CrazyButcher

palettes only make sense on the limited devices as snowfly said. modern hardware has no support for palettes anymore (like nvidia took it out of their drivers some time ago)
so if you do stuff for pc/mac dont worry about palettes. texture compression and so on exists and will take your 24 or 32 bit textures.

e.g quake2 which still had palettes will convert all textures to 24 bit or 32 bit (if with alpha) when running in opengl.

Eric Chadwick

Some good info here comparing 32bit vs. 8bit (UDN calls it "Bright") vs. DXT (a compressed texture format), especially since you're working with UT2k4...
http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/TextureComparison
Also they have a confirmation of CrazyButcher's last comment, see the last sentence of that link.

You'll want to use DXT3 or DXT5 as much as possible with your textures, compressed textures let you load more/larger textures at once.

malcolm

DXT1 for the win, for colour maps any ways.