I now have the power to be applying much higher resolution textures to all my assets within Unreal Engine 4.
I want to get the most out of my new found power:)
What are the highest texture sizes I can get away with??
2048, 4096, higher? I worry if I apply to high resolution textures in my games I might lose performance but
there is a lot I can be doing. Should I stick to textures sizes like 128 by 128, 256 by 256, 512 by 512,
1024 by 1024, 2048 by 2048, or can I go up to 4096 by 4096? Is that to much? I want to get the most
out of my games and the higher the texture quality the better. Who has any thoughts on this?
I would avoid going up to 4096, but really you should still use best practices and keep the resolution as low as possible. Use high resolution for things that are most important or that can’t get enough detail without it.
Something a lot of new developers fail to consider is consistency across texture resolutions. Generally you want to have as close as possible texture density across objects of the same size. It looks bad if you have a wall texture that is 4096x4096 and then right beside it you have a large door with a 128x128 texture applied.
Honestly, texture density matters very little, as long as the individual thing looks OK by itself.
If your making a FPS, you can get away with using a 4K maps for first person weapons. If you need/want to have ALOT of 4K textures everywhere check out: http://www.graphinesoftware.com/products/granite-for-unreal I have not tested it yet, but I’ll buy a indie license after GDC - they also offer a free trail.
Honestly, virtual texture should be standard in UE4 everyone benefits from it regardless of genre.
Always make your assets with larger texures than you intend to use, that way you can scale down if you find out performance isn’t good enough.
I use only few textures and some are not power of two.
I tested it out for me personal and aside power of two *.tga 32bit gives me the best results.
While testing with sizing of textures i found some small, but perhaps interesting stuff for non power of two textures.
I bet it’s old stuff, but was fresh for me.
When you have a texture 345x845px then create a plane in UE4 (or a materialslot in your 3d app) in the exact(!) size.
y0.345 x— z0.845, when then a material with the texture is added to it, you can uniform scale it up very high, without to much loss of quality.
Means can use small textures for big objects.
I believe thats because UE4 doesnt produce mipmaps for textures that arent a power of 2, which can make the textures look very bad at distances and also they take up more memory.
It depends on the mesh, if its big i use 2048, standard 1024, for small meshes like a shield or bucket 512, maybe even 256 is enough. 4096 is just a waste of space and memory, unless maybe for VR or 4k monitors, and very close views, maybe.