Is it better to have one or two large skins, or three or four smaller ones? Currently, I have modeled a house that uses 2 512x768 skins, and 2 256x384 skins...(yes, they are big. I plan on reducing them later on). Anyways, Would it be better, after reduced, to clump these skins together, and make one or two bigger skins, or keep them seperate, and use three or four smaller skins?

Thank you.

You should use a texture of a power of 2 for the size. Odd sizes may not display properly or even cause problems. That is, instead of 768, use either 512 or 1024. Instead of 384, use either 256 (the fastest) or 512. 256x256 is the fastest, but I otherwise see hardly any speed change. I suggest going no higher than 1024 on a side. Having multiple skins on the same model means having that model take longer to render. From a test I did, a model with 16 skins rendered as bad as ten models with 1 single skin. The actual results showed 62% faster rendering.

Ok, so lets say that I reduce all my skins down to 256x256, from what I understand, it would be better to use 1 1024x1024 skin rather than 4 256x256 skins?

If this is the case, then thank you, I will get on this. If not, sorry for misinterperting your post.

You can fit 16 256x256 textures into a single 1024x1024 texture. You can fit 4 512x512 textures into a single 1024x1024 texture. You can go bigger than 1024 on a side, but make sure you use mipmaps otherwise, if you video card doesn't support a texture size of 4096 on a side, you'll get errors.

oh, haha, my mistake with the 1024, sorry. And, finally, not to be a pain , but I was just noticing... my house is longer than it is wide. If I make my textures 256x256, the textures will stretch badly in one direction. Also, the mest does not allow for very neat tileing. So... is it completely bad to use textures outside the "power of two" rule of thumb?

theorically 256x512 or 256x1024 is power of 2 too

You have a few options in this case:

1. Tile 'em. Textures in 6.4x can be tiled quite well.
2. Scale your texture to the appropriate size. This can cause a loss in detail, however.
3. Increase the image size to 512x1024, center the new area, and copy the pixels on the far left side to the left of the image and those on the far right side to the far right side of the image. Doing this helps reduce odd artifacts you may see from the extra space on the sides.

Although many modern cards support non-power-of-2 textures, such textures are slower and otherwise pose compatibility problems with older cards and mipmaps may not work or behave properly.

I was faced with the same issue with my 3D game's buildings. Either I use a single 512x512 texture scaled to a tiny 1/5.333 scale or I merge three instances in a 3x3 grid to make a larger 1024x1024 texture scaled to a 1/3.556 scale which is much more closer to my target scale (which is 1/4).

ok, well heres what she looks like. This uses 4 256x256 skins, which can easily be made into 1 512x512 skin. The outside texture is most likely not the one I will use as a final, seeing as it looks a little grainy...





Note: This is my first venture into making 100% my own resourses. This minigame I am making will be all me, which is something I would really like to accomplish, even though it may not look as good .

The shape looks very good, however. Did you make that out of blocks or as an MDL file? Throughout this thread, I'm thinking MDL file since that's what I use for levels. I don't use blocks because they are downright slow at rendering. Given the debug panel (as a source for clues), it seems like it's an MDL file.

It is in fact MDL7. I also prefer models over blocks, for the same reason. I forgot to mention, although its fairly obvious, that this is not done. I simply slaped the textures on there to see how the 256 textures looked. Unfortunately, due to school, several community projects, and other stuff, I usually only have about an hour a day to work on game design. So, either production moves VERY slowly, or the quality of the stuff I make is not so good, because I rush to finish it. Regardless, thanks for the comments Ulillillia, youve been a big help on this topic.