character maps:more than one map?

CompanionCube

i've notice in games like unreal tournament and gears of war, and a few characters in other games that more than one 2048 is being used. for my next show reel character should i avoid using more than one 2048 map or will it become common place as developers get to grips with hardware/software?

thanks

Eric Chadwick

Better to use a single map in most cases. There are a couple reasons to use multiple maps. Some console hardware works better with multiple smaller bitmaps than one large bitmap. Another reason is if the game has a swap-uniforms feature, or swap-skincolor, or other kinds of customization. Then you want to isolate the changeable bits, so you don't have to make as many textures, and it also saves on loading time and memory use.

Neox

well unreal automaticly rescales head textures down to 512 and all the other textures to 1024, never got a 2048 texture in there to stay at it's initial size, after saving U3 compresses the textures so hard that they look worse then a rescaled 1024 version from photoshop, so i had to split my last character into 2 maps, one 1024x1024 and one 512x1024

FAT_CAP

SEKNeox - the automatic compression inside Unreal is probably down to which LODBias the texture is set to - basically a LODBias of 1 sets the texture to full resolution, with LODBias 2 at half that resolution, 3 at half that again etc etc. Setting the LODGroup to TEXTUREGroup_Full gives the best sharpenss to a texture. You can access these settings by double clicking on a texture in the Generic Browser - not sure if you can force Unreal Vanilla to keep these settings at runtime but I don't see why not.

Neox

lol everyone told me to use something like LODbias -1 or lower to increase the details, now it's too late for that character but i'l give it a go, thanks

Neox

ok tested it and 1 is definitely worse then -1 and -1 is like a 2048 scaled down to 1024 and i don't have a texturegroup_full in UT so i guess changing from one 2k map to one 1k and another 1024x512 was a good decision.