Texture Sizes: UE3

Incomitatum

When I first started dabbling in this fine art. I was chastised for using 1024 sheets. Most people would say that if I was to downsample to 512 then I wouldn't even see any loss of quality; trying to prove that there was not enough detail lost in the iterum to make a difference.

Now that I am reading tutorials and seeing assets made for UE3, it seems that everyone has gone 2048 crazy! Is there -actually- a need for this? Do artist put such fine detail into their creations with these next-gen graphics that downsampling to 1024 would not yeild the same result?

I am wondering if people have just created that sort of real estate so they will have enough to hang themselves with.

Your wisdom is appreciated,

-Andrew

Kevin Johnstone

Its the holdover from our PC days where we author at the maximum res and leave the
downsampling to code so that the people with the ninja pc's can see it super hi res.

EarthQuake

If people are telling you that you can downsize your textures without any noticable loss in detail its because you dont have that detail to begin with, it doesn't really have much to do with currecnt hardward/engine specs. If you were allowed a 4096x4096 but there wasnt any noticable difference between your texture at that res or one at 1024 people would still tell you to size it down. What they're really saying is to work on adding more detail to your textures.

To expand on it on the tech side a little more, i often use pretty large textures, like 2048 but group in multiple props, so i may have 12 models all using a single 2048. It tends to be faster with current tech if you can group things together(use less materials, fewer textures) as it used to be faster to use more, smaller textures on ps2 level hardware. So while you may load up 2048's for gears or such, i think that you'll find some of them get used to create entire buildings, or large parts of buildings for example.

Another thing worth mentioning is that sometimes your level of detail doesnt need to be consistant across you D/N/S textures, sometimes your normals need more res and you can size down the diffuse/spec, sometimes the spec is going to be the most detailed and you can size down the diffuse/normals. This sort of optimization tends to get done towards the end of a project.