Texture Resolution

Sean VanGorder

So I always see people baking their textures maps at twice the resolution of the final map they'll actually use, and then down res them before importing to the engine. I've always been under the impression that it's better to bake at the actual size to begin with, but with high quality settings and super sampling, so you'll avoid any loss of quality that may come with downsizing in photoshop.

It either of these methods the "correct" way to go about it?

EarthQuake

It doesn't really matter either way. For instance if you're using supersampling in max, this is basically the exact same thing as rendering 2x in photoshop and sizing down.

I've seen programers suggest that you should always render the correct size, as resizing in photoshop "does bad stuff" to your normals, but in practice with hundreds of bakes i've done, i've never run into any problems related to shrinking maps in photoshop.

Swizzle

EarthQuake wrote: »

I've seen programers suggest that you should always render the correct size, as resizing in photoshop "does bad stuff" to your normals, but in practice with hundreds of bakes i've done, i've never run into any problems related to shrinking maps in photoshop.

The only explanation I ever heard for this is that Photoshop is meant to work with color, not actual polygon normals, so you might get weird averaged colors that correspond to messed up normal directions. I don't think this is something that anybody actually has to worry about the in the real world, though.

Bad Spleen

I'd imagine that game engines would convert textures in their own way, so even if you got a perfect normal map, there may be some loss in the conversion, not to mention mip mapping, pixel to texel ratio etc, the slight errors that you might see are going to be pretty much indistinguishable.

What dustinbrown said about texture painting at smaller sizes, I second that.

equil

i believe scaling in photoshop isn't done in linear space so you actually lose color every time you rescale something. but practically this shouldn't be noticable enough to worry about.

ceebee

Blurry shrinking can occur in Photoshop if you have Bicubic Smoother turned on instead of Bicubic Sharper in your Photoshop preferences. I usually keep Bicubic Sharper on, I dunno if there's a better way but that's usually what I do. It's also available as a seperate option if you resize by going to Image Size under the Image menu.