Material question. (Resolution vs quantity)

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Do you wish to have 8k material on single object.

or 2k material divided to 4 in single object.

2

You shouldn’t be using 8K textures

The number of textures isn’t so bad as the amount of memory it uses. Use techniques like tiled textures to increase quality without having to use large textures.

3

No. I make realistic power mech.

tiling are no in my design.

And my tile texture are… small.

(btw i am talking about do 4 material do better than single big material ?).

4

8k = ~67 megapixels
4k = ~17 megapixels
2k = ~4.2 megapixels

Single texture can be better, but size of square textures is multiplicative.

5

Look at other games that use mechs

6

thanks. That helping.

7

Resolution =/= quality. Anyone that has downloaded a Skyrim texture pack knows how awful slapping a 4k texture on everything can look.

Think of resolution more as pixel density, a 1080p can only display about half of a 2k texture at a time at native resolution, using 30 times that resolution on one asset seems ridiculous.

Paragon used tiling textures with their textures, a workflow like that for a mech would work great. Even just detail normals would likely give the effect and look of higher resolution textures, without using a ridiculous amount of memory.

8

i am still newbie. maybe i need some training

9

Sinlge texture seems okay. 8K pretty large tbough.

10

You might want to check into how Star Citizen is pulling off their materials for their ships. I want to say they use a lot of tiling/micro tiling and then use a lot of decals that add things like bolts, rivets, lines, typical hard-edge mecha style art stuff, etc. I don’t think any of their ship textures go above 2 or 4k. They pack the decals into atlas packs that are probably no larger than 2k (keep in mind they have multiple channels like normal/albedo/metallic).

11

Combination of unique + tiling + floating decal should yield best results in terms of memory and visual fidelity. It well known and proven technique. Use power of two textures to support MIP mapping and MIP and texture streaming in UE. BTW, smaller textures render faster.

12

There’s this also.