Texture size

Hi guys,

recently I've just been texturing a model (my player character) when I came to the point where I had to create a new texture which fits the model myself. So for the first time ever I had to ask myself: "how big does it need to be?"

I decided to use a 512x512, however, it still does not look very good on the model (especially scratched metal surfaces look really ugly). If you had to texture a model which is very important for the game, the player will see it often (sometimes even close-up) and the model is placed only once per level, what texture size would you choose? I have no idea how much texture memory space modern graphic cards have, so I would need some tips from users who have more experience with this topic than I have myself...


Thanks in advance,


Alan

If is a player model that you see very close use 2048x2048, if it's close but not too much use 1024x1024

Painkiller nailed it...
But, I must add to his response...
I suggest that you do not make it larger than 1024 square...
But that depends on the file sizes of all the other rendered objects...
The reason I say this is because all the rendered objects can drastically affect your frame rate.
On that note, I also suggest that when you are happy with your texture file... convert it to a .dds file.
That type of file runs the best, as I've found, because the file size is much smaller than say a, .bmp or a .pcx or a .tga...
I also suggest that your animation is bones based rather than vertice based. Once again, bones is a much smaller file size...
Hope that helps...

Hi,

thanks for your replies. 1024 square sounds like a lot to me but I'll give it a try soon.

@TerraSame: convert to .dds? First question: what tool do you use for that? Second question: I suppose .dds is a compressing file format, therefore the A7 engine will have to de-compress the image before displaying it, causing some CPU ressources to get lost due to the decompression process. At least that's the way I understood the reason why one should never use .jpg textures - but maybe it is a whole different story when using .dds files...


Greets,


Alan

Nvidia provides some tools for converting to DDS (Photoshop plugin and standalone application). There is also a GIMP plugin for this.

In contrast to JPG or other compressed image file formats, DDS files run natively on the GPU. They can be decompressed on the fly. The image quality is worse, though.

Well it depends of the texture, in some ones the difference between a bmp and a dds isn't great.
To convert to DDS you can use DXTbmp, it's a free tool, you can open bmp, dds, tga, etc. Find it in google.

Hi guys,

thanks a lot for your help, I really appreciate it! I'll go and check out the tools you mentioned, I'm sure that they will prove useful!

Thanks,


Alan

Hi,

I would have another question regarding textures. Let's assume we have two different models in different .mdl files which both use the same texture file (texture is set to "extern" in MEDs Skin Editor). When I place them both in my level, will the texture appear in memory once or twice?
Same goes for placing one model many times - will each copy consume texture space or does the number of placed entities of one kind not affect the texture space?

Thanks in advance,


Alan

put tex_share=1 and they will appear only once in the memory


About the models, i think the same models appear only once

Hi,

never heard of "tex_share" so far but it is good to know that something like that actually exists, could prove to be useful in some cases - so thanks for your reply!

Greets,

Alan

If I'm not mistaken tex_share is for map entities only. It doesn't affect model entities.

I guess external textures are shared automatically.

Multiple instances of one model file share the mesh and the skin. That's why there are clone functions to prevent this in special cases.