Hello everyone
I am facing an issue with texel density and it might be going right over my head so every help is appreciated. I am creating a very simple asset (at least the low poly version is simple) and intend on following the classic workflow, baking in Marmoset from the high poly made in Zbrush and then texturing in Substance. As an instruction it's mentioned that the texel density should be 10px/cm. Now I am not sure what I am doing wrong but here is my issue. Setting the map size to 2048 I then add on the box bellow the value of 10 (which I guess is the box for setting the value for px/cm) and the uvs are going of the1 to1 uv space, which means I cant bake properly. So of course I have to scale them down a bit, but then I get a lower value of something like 8.5. So what am I missing here? (I know that for tileable textures this is not an issue).
Replies
it's not always possible to ensure you're exactly at a set texture resolution. 8.5 vs 10 won't be very noticeable in-game.
Find ways to reuse texture space so you can meet the required texel density.
I'd be expecting 10px/cm average if that's what I wrote on the brief, it's up to you to be clever enough to achieve it
@poopipe I dont get why you would bother answering when you are clearly not interested in helping
I told you exactly what you need to do.
If you need help doing it you're going to need to provide more information
Or you could just ignore the brief.
reuse texture space = stack/mirror things that can be, scale down unseen parts so that seen parts can stay at target texel density. In other words, use some creativity to solve the problem.
poopipe gave you answer, may be just assumed you are able to pay closer attention to detail than you are capable of. instead of being a snippy baby, just reread a few times to see if you missed something.
I use 2-4 pix per cm. Sometimes non-square texels. 10pix is insanely small that results to texture repeating like crazy and no amount of clever tricks would help to cover it or the textures would have to be deprived of anything, any unique details making them look realistic.
Well, for something right next to your nose 10 pix is fine my guess. i.e a weapon and a character hands in first person game.
An important skill is ability to find ,stay and balance at a very edge of details getting to dissolve among pixels with not high enough texel density . Sometimes you can get acceptable result with twice bigger texels than you initially thought.
Substance designer is not very per pixel efficient for example. It's always good to have tiwice of target resolution and scale down in final textures. If your hardware allows to work in 2x resolution. Also Photoshop scales down pixels a way more clever nowadays , up to pixel art level sometimes. it also helps to not waste pixels for nothing.
@gnoop thanks a lot for your answer :)