I have a tree created from curves.
I used automatic UV and baked the texture, but there’s still a lot of empty space.
I want to reduce the texture without losing quality.
Doing this manually is difficult because the tree is just a collection of curves.
Hum, you can try to pack the islands to waste less space in the UV :
Then bake again…
Then it all goes down to how close you’re supposed to be from the tree…
Say the tree is really in the distance, then probably with a 1k image it’s going to be fine as the tree is going to be a few pixels on screen…
Now if you need to be really close to the trunk then that 1k texture is going to look very blurry…
So reducing texture size without loosing quality really depends on the distance between the camera and the subject… You need to test to see what size is acceptable …
This is a pretty simple texture with flat colors, so I suppose it would take reduction pretty well. Have you tried just reducing the resolution of the image to see the result?
Do you need the texture to be perfectly clean from up close? If you do, this exact kind of look could pretty easily be achieved using a procedural texture (noise in the material) instead of an image texture. Procedural textures have unlimited resolution as they are calculated with maths instead of stored as a finite number of pixels.
I know this material was originally a combination of different noises. But I learned that for best optimization, it’s best to store it in a texture.
It depends. In this case, it looks like a very simple procedural noise, so the performance impact is probably quite small. When you are dealing with such a simple material, it’s not always clear which one will be better (image textures aren’t completely free of a cost either).
Baking to texture is really useful if you have a procedural material that’s really complex and heavy, with many different noises, AO, multiple masks, blending between multiple materials etc.
In this case, I would say you have good reasons to use the noise directly if it’s easier and looks better.