Sorry to wake up this thread but I’m a bit tired to read this kind of answer “who need 8k textures ?”, nothing personal though.
Here is a case I would be glad if you give me ‘the’ answer not involving 8k and in fact, even more high-res textures:
Lets say you want to simulate a situation where you are in low orbit around the planet earth, that is at an altitude of ~400km above the planet surface. Then you want the planet to spin (because you are in a ISS like space station that actually orbit around the earth), you don’t want just a fixed, static matte painting nor ‘skybox’, you really want something dynamic, with animated cloud cover (spinning as well).
If you simulate this situation in your 3D DCC, you will realize it is a real challenge. You are so close from the planet surface that even a 8k texture covering the all planet is far from sufficient.
I’m actually doing some researches on this matter in Unreal 4 and so far here is my result: I have to simulate UDIMs in a material, where the all planet texture is split into 2 rows and 4 columns of 4k textures (virtually a texture size of 16kx8k) and… it is not yet sufficient, in order to be ok I have to double those numbers by using 8k textures, so a virtual resolution of 32kx16k. This, displayed on a full HD monitor, not even a 4K one.
Does this enlarge your vision of texturing and make you understand that there are situations where 8k textures are, in fact, needed ?
That said, there may be a wiser solution to this kind if issue and I would be glad if you could enlight me. The only alternative I can think of right now is to pre-render a movie of the visible portion of the earth spinning and camera map it on a mesh of that portion. But then it is not dynamic anymore (can’t change the lighting direction, day/night cycle, etc…).
Any idea ?
Cheers,
.