Generally i use like 12 pixels for padding, for normals and AO and also fill in the empty space in the normals with 127,127,255. [edit]lol no i mean 12 padding for nm/ao =D
Setting it to 12 or so dosent mean i try to leave 12 pixel borders between uv islands, as that would be pretty wasteful in most cases. A lot of the time its ok if the mips bleed to another part of the uv, as longs as its not bleeding to a black area etc. No of course if you have drasticly diferent materials, using 8-16…
12 pixels, wow. How low do your mips go? Or how big are your maps that 12px isn't that big? I thought 2-6 was standard. Maybe I need to get with the times...
I think the minimum edge padding(dilation) to use is: log2(max(width,height)) + 1 = nMipmap Levels + 1 for example... for a 2k x 2k texture is (12+1) = 13 in that way it's guaranteed that if two pixels use the maximum and minimum mipmap LOD then a 2x2 box filter result won't present visible seams. The default in xNormal is…