Hello everybody,
I am wondering just what is considered overkill when it comes to textures.
In this shot I have a 640x640 map on the left pole and a 2048x2048 map on the right. I notice the extra detail, but at what expense is the detail coming? The 2048 texture is obviously a bigger file size and I’m not sure, after I do all the textures in the scene, that it will be worth it to go high detail on everything.
Your thoughts?
Higher texture sizes come at the cost of more memory usage and slower rendering times.
If you are offline rendering then these issues are less predominant, but for real time rendering such as games then it is by far one of the largest limitations.
Is this for game rendering?
For any render it’s a waste of time to have textures larger than you’ll see…
A “good” rule of thumb is to have textures slightly larger than they will appear when closest to the camera in an animation… so if your log will be seen in 1280X720 and occupy half the screen then the portion you see close should be 640 wide at least, but anything more than 1280 wide in that bit will be a total waste!
Awesome, Ty for replying.
Consider, quite literally, how many pixels this texture will occupy in the final render, at whatever pixel resolution that render is going to be produced at. You don’t need to ask the computer to crunch through the values of 100,000 pixels to determine the final values of 1,000 pixels. (So to speak.)
Your UV-mapping strategy can have a lot to do with this. For example, if one-fourth of a cylinder is going to be visible on screen, map the portion that will be visible and forget the rest. Choose an appropriately-located and appropriately-scaled portion of the source bitmap, both so that “stretching” or “pixellation” do not occur, and also so that an appropriate amount of input image-data (and no more…) is used in Blender’s calculations.
No, only for the fun of it. But, I’m hoping to eventually use some of the models in games. I guess I could just create a couple different sized textures for offline and in game.
There isnt much point in making 2 sets of textures really, because there isnt going to be a massive wait for a 2k texture offline.
I would just spend the time making 1 awesome texture (power of 2 size) and use that for both 
It all depends on how close you are to the meshes, even if you’re close, a 2k texture is pretty excessive. Wood can be tiled pretty easy. Rather make a 512 x 512 texture, and make it tileable. There’s an easy way to do that in Photoshop using the Offset filter : http://www.designbash.com/photoshop/photoshop-offset-filter-making-seamless-textures/
It all depends on the size of the object. Most current gen games use a ratio of 4-8px per inch/2.5cm for environment pieces
But as Chris said, you can do things like tile the textures and scale the UVs to get a higher texel density.
I’ll expand a bit on textures for games. Consider the importance of the object the texture will be mapped to. Will it be a major prop you’ll see all the time? Or a minor, small prop you’ll rarely see. There’s no blanket rule, except maybe the 4-8 px per inch mentioned above, which I’ve not heard of. Use tiling textures on large objects, and reuse textures. 512 px sq tiling is my default for game textures, but of course on very small items that drops significantly. Conversely, I’ll splurge on a 2048 px tiling texture for an object that will be seen all the time - the walls of my castle for instance.
See my signature for some other game speed tips compiled from various sources, including suggestions on BA.
