2x1024 or 1 x 2048 ??
polycounter lvl 12
Hello everyone. Just a fast noob question.
I am prepairing textures for a character. I just wanted to ask if 2 x 1024 or simply one 2048 map would be optimised ( for game engines)
Yeah I always wondered that
Thanks a lot.
I am prepairing textures for a character. I just wanted to ask if 2 x 1024 or simply one 2048 map would be optimised ( for game engines)
Yeah I always wondered that
Thanks a lot.
Replies
Also realise that 2x(1024x1024) is only half of 1x(2048x2048 ). Think about it spatially; two side by side 1024^2 maps would be 1024x2048; only taking up half of a 2048x2048 map.
1024x1024 head
1024x1024 Torso and Arms
1024x1024 legs and feet.
Elements such as hats, gloves, shoes can often be separate also. I have known characters to be broken down even more than this and then combined for optimization in an automated pipeline.
When making props I always try to squeeze in as many props as I can on the same texture. Even if there's less texture space for each prop I still get more pixels to work with for each prop which means I can get more details on them.
Also when I neew different maps for specular / normals / height / AO / gloss / displacement it helps me keep the amount of textures down. All these maps for each individual props would be almost unmanageable.
Anyway that's just my amateur observation, perhaps it's different for characters which I have zero experience with. In any case I would also like more experienced input on this.
that's not completely right.. the "materials" / shader calls are drawcalls.. one shader which is using 2 textures will generate the same amount of drawcalls compared to the same shader using just one texture
Two maps will be one draw call if you use layering with two textures applied over all pixels, or write some code to use vertex colours to pick the texture. Two maps with one draw call will be a higher cost per-pixel than one map with two draw calls.
@ IchII3D, NinthJake: Thanks for sharing experience. I'll think about those.
To further detail it down I think todays graphics cards ( for PC's I mean) suffer from speed ( processing power) , not from enough memry. I usually see a lot of cheap GPU's with 3 GB of memory but the "real deals" has much more processing power.
In this case do you think it is wise to go for less drawcalls ?
The best rules of thumb are to do things so they're not dumb and slow (there's no easy, clearly better solution) and then optimise as you go. You'll get 80% of your speed savings from fixing up 20% of your project - you just need to find the bottlenecks. If your game can't support one extra draw call per character, and that's your bottleneck, it's an easy fix later on to combine textures. But more likely than not your bottlenecks will be fill rate or CPU limitations so you'll do this and forget about it.
Basically, when two things are in the same order of magnitude, you just need to test it. You could make ten games and have five run faster with more maps and the other five run faster with larger maps.
It depends on so many factors that to guess without knowing them (and even to guess when knowing them) would be like looking at an X-ray of a brain and trying to work out what it was thinking. You just test these things. Spend this time focusing on making better art, not mathematically correct art
Guess you sais the last and right word mate.
Thanks a lot everyone. I will be going with a 2 x 1024. And from now on I guess I'll have to test it out.
Of course if I encounter anything intersting. I will be writing it here.
Good bakin' everyone and thanks again
One material with 2 textures is 1 draw call.
Two materials with 1 texture each is 2 draw calls.
And in forward rendering, that's also an extra draw call per material per per-pixel light (so for 2 per-pixel lights, we're now at 2 draw calls and 4 draw calls, respectively).
And, depending on the engine and batching, you might have to add another draw call per material for each shadow-casting light.
The problem was I was trying to generalize a simple rule for draw calls where by if you use two textures across different sections leading to two materials and therefore 2 draw calls. Obviously it is a lot more complex then this as you have to take into consideration the lighting and whether you are using a forward renderer or a deferred renderer.