There are two basic guiding principles when it comes to textures:
- Use as few of them as possible: Try to combine different surfaces into a single texture (google “texture atlas”) so the video card doesn’t have to juggle with too many of them at once.
- Use as much of a texture as possible: Don’t waste texels. It’s a bit trickier if you are baking textures because there the UV layout makes or breaks a good texture: If the UV islands are too far from each other then the gap between them is wasted; if they are too close then in higher MIPs they can bleed onto each other, producing seams.
Speaking of MIP mapping, you don’t have to worry about manually creating different resolutions for textures, the engine will take care of that. Just create the source image in as high res as you can, you’ll be able to set the in-game size later.
Anyway, there is more to texture optimization that this (packing, tiling, mixing different frequency details, procedurally changing parts of a texture to avoid storing slight variations of the same texture, etc) but those are longer topics.
I hope this helps, let me know if you have questions. ![]()