Multiple textures or single texture

Sharvo

Hello,

Normally i would texture everything on one map for example a barrel or chair. However, i have recently started to try layered textures so i would have a base colour map and seperate maps for details, occlusion etc.

The texture size of the multiples is smaller or the same size as a single texture but the quality is just as good or better, but just wondering if it would be more process for an engine to load one big texture or various smaller textures.

I have an example i could upload over the weekend if this doesnt make sense, but just wanted to know other peoples opinions. Or am i just trying to be a bit fancy for no reason at all. Doing multiple textures has helped me understand a lot about udks material editor, exporting meshes and uv maps.

Rick_D

more textures means more drawcalls, more passes for the renderer to do and impacting performance.

mortalhuman

Yea, you should continue atlasing your textures wherever possible unless to do so would negatively effect your texture memory budgets, whatever they may be.

Like if you are doing a building and it is part of a large city environment, you might do all of its windows and bits and bobs on one texture, maybe that texture has some stuff like unique tiling bricks to that building.

But odds are the roof is shared and maybe there is some concrete that is generic.

That being the case, you might texture your building with those three tex, and another building will use those roof and concrete tex, now you are sharing memory and that is good. It is good to spend extra draw calls in the regard of reusing the same textures. It's best to reduce draw calls by keeping anything unique about any given object all in a single texture.

generic textures, use single ones, or atlas them if you can in clever ways and still use them generically, but anything being used once and on the same model ought to try your hardest to put them all on the same tex where possible.

naked_chicken

This also can depend on the engine. Our engine at my work relies heavily on streaming and really large textures often presented issues with that. It's really a balancing act, you don't want your textures to be too big but you also don't want a huge number of small textures either.