Let’s say I’m modelling a photorealistic leather jacket.
I’m confused about texel density. I’ve been told having them all even is good practice, but if I lay out the buttons of the jacket on the UV tile and the buttons are tiny in comparison to the jacket, won’t the buttons look blurry?
Shouldn’t the button UV’s be laid out larger so it doesn’t lose detail?
Or does that make the buttons too high rez looking compared to the jacket??? I’m confused how this all works.
Uniform texel size is good, reasonable texel size is better. So yes, if you need more detail on some parts, you may want to increase these UV islands accordingly. Your buttons (maybe with some imprint) are a good example. Also: faces of characters. And don’t waste good UV space for parts that you don’t really see such as the underside of a table, etc…
I see. So I can get away with adjusting UV island size even if it means the texel density won’t be perfect throughout the scene.
With the buttons, as they are such a small piece of mesh(but still clearly visible) is it better to put them in a separate 2K UV tile instead of the jacket’s 4K UV tile? Is this more memory efficient?
Textel has to do with how many dots per inch you get on the render screen
so depends also how close the camera is to the objects and their resolution
happy bl
Don’t know what exactly you are working on here but that sounds like overkill to me.
Well… if you look into the real world ( which is the best reference 
)…
…what different density does the buttons have compared to the jacket ?
This said… it might be usefull to give the buttons a slighty denser density because the jacket texture might have even not have so much details… and so you might not see this on the jacket…
If this is for “realistic” and you want to have a closeup down to the buttons… than it might be easier to have them the same density… and so you might get them from the same reference photo as texture (no adjusting need)…
…and also: 2K for the buttons while the jacket is 4K ??? I guess the buttons are maximal 2-4% of the area of the jacket…
Ok, thanks.