Frustrated with materials required storage

Development Rendering
1

So I been playing around with different marketplace assets and I noticed the average 4K material takes 200MB or more.
This is frustrating because I add a 3-4 props that barely have any impact in the game and that’s another gigabyte required.
This is obviously for an indie/solo project, assuming I release it some day, I can’t afford ending with something that require the same storage that RDR2.

A few questions I’d like to ask you guys:

  • Should I point to 1440p textures instead?
  • Is it safe to just downsize the textures, is there any special technique for it?
  • Any other tip for saving more space?

I’m not considering compression once packaged, not sure what’s the impact, anyways, if it’s not a storage problem it certainly is for RAM/VRAM usage.

Thanks in advance for any input.

2

Construct your props out of multiple more generic tiling layered materials instead of one massive asset-specific one. This was how Epic did it for Paragon and allows you to use lower resolution textures more efficiently because they’ll be reused frequently and expected to tile. At most you’ll likely have to store a per-object normal map and a set of masks, both of which you can get by with fairly low resolutions.