I know that purpose of edge padding is to prevent “black holes”, when model is resized. But do we still need it, since we use rather new graphical engines, which can handle textures properly without edge padding?
Besides, edge padding ofthen looks terrible if we need promo textures. May be edge padding is not so neccessary anymore?
Padding is needed with mipmapping to prevent (the risk of) black edges along UV seams due to changing mip levels. At a lower res, the UV shell might hang past the painted region, so you need to pad it out a bit to ensure there’s still paint there. Mipmapping is useful not only for improving texture filtering and speeding lookups, but it also allows the render engine to load mipmap levels on demand thus reducing memory for textures that don’t need to be loaded at their full resolution. Cycles currently only supports mipmapping in OSL mode, but mipmaps for SVM (the thing that gets used instead of OSL when you disable OSL) are planned in the not-to-distant future as part of GSOC.