Question on painting textures for the DS

PolyPutty

What is a good way to approach painting textures for the DS? do you paint them at a higher res then shrink them down, or do paint them at the intended resolution? I was hearing around the office that you can only have 256 colors for the DS, how do you go about making sure you are utilizing all 256 colors well? Anyone that is vary familar with DS texture work care to give some advice? I am not so good at geting good results with very low texture sizes. I would definetly like to become stronger in this area.

pliang

One thing I would say is that always work bigger to start with.

Steve Schulze

Lord no, don't do that. Its bad practice any time, but shrinking down to DS res you'll wind up with a smudgy mess of pixels. Just learn to work at a low res. 64*64 is the most common size you'll work with unless you really desperatly need the extra size or can afford to shrink it down even smaller.

You don't -have- to use 256 colour textures as such - the DS will display true colour textures. Like the resolution though, unless you really need a very smooth gradient, you'll get away with 256 colour, and a lot of the time, a 16 colour texture. The DS has limited texture memory and space on the cartridge, so anywhere you can afford to cut down the size or colour depth will be helpful.

For making 256 colour textures, simply paint them in millions-of-colours as you normally would and then drop them to 8 bit indexed colour, or 4 bit for 16 colour. You'll probably need to muck around with the setting a bit to get the best result if you're going with 4 bit - which of the adaptive palettes you want to use and whether you need to use one of the dithering types (in most cases I leave his turned off)

fade1

as jackablade said, i wouldn't paint the textures in a bigger size. get's you a blury result and you have to readjust uv's or repaint the texture too much.
and don't think about the 256colors. just sample them down when you're done. sometimes it's good to split your texture sheets up, when you have a lot of different colors in them. so put the reds on one sheet and the blue/greys on another. then you have the option to even drop them to 16 colors(just 1/4 texture memory...)

PolyPutty

thanks for the help, so you think its bad to down rez even with making textures for say the xbox 360 and wii as well? good to know these forums always give such great advice.

Panupat

For bigger textures I don't think it's as serious. Say, scaling down 2048 to 1024. Your primary concern would be anything with only 1 pixel width in the high resolution image, those will get really lost when you down res.

Ghostscape

When you're working that small especially, a single pixel's worth of data is very important. If you scale down everything is going to get blurry and lines that should be 1 pixel wide become 2 pixels wide and it all goes to hell.

If you're making a HUGE texture scaling down is not a bad (although I don't like it personally) but for anything 256 and under you definitely don't want to be scaling things down.

Chunkey

One thing I would say from working on GBA for 2 years and also on PSP for about the same amount of time is that you wanna make sure you don't have lots of noise in your textures or you'll get scintilation (when several texels are fighting for the same pixel).

It all comes down to just picking an eye of what works

just stick max in to software mode, do renders at DS resolution and you'll see what I mean

Sage

the other thing that is your friend on painting ds sized textures is to use the pencil tool in photoshop instead of the brush tool.

Alex