The gamekit book is a little vague on this one, so I wondered if anyone here could help.
What exactly will happen if I try to use UV texture images which aren’t exact multiples of 64 pixels, or larger than 256x256, in a game?
Will some graphics cards reject them and leave faces blank, will they slow down a lot, will they crash the system, or what?
On a related note, is it generally considered a better idea to combine all textures for a specific object or piece of scenery into a single image which you then use for all texturing, or to use separate images for each texture? (an excellent example of the former would be the image on page 201 of the gamekit book)
I’m thinking that as long as the image is small enough to be handled by the graphics hardware, then using a single image of multiple textures for an object would be better.
Also, what if the polygon you want to map an image to is so large (eg a wall in a long corridor) that standard sized UV images are simply too small? Should you use a very big image (<<256x256) to avoid obvious and unsightly tiling effects, or break it up into several smaller polygons(which will presumably lower performance) and use a separate UV image for each, which have to be painstakingly made to line up with each other?
Or can you perhaps map multiple image files to a single polygon? (probably not, but you never know…)