Hello, I was wondering what the general consensus is on using large textures for large pieces as opposed to cutting a piece into multiple meshes/textures. I tend to divide meshes where I can for this very reason, especially in UDK, however for this particular part of my level I’m trying to go for a grandiose feel. I have large pillars, walls, and floor panels. They are already split into multiple pieces, my issue though is the size. I have only needed a 4096 once or twice so far, in another area comprised of big and small meshes. Will this affect performance? Currently I have 2 4096 pieces, both have a diffuse and a roughness texture of that size. I’m thinking of cutting out the roughness texture and going with a plain constant. I’m looking at about another 10 pieces of similar size that will be needing a 4096. Before I proceed I want to know if this is going to have an impact on performance. I can’t split these really since they’re basically stand alone pieces, not compositions of multiple.
If this were to be an issue with performance, would using similarly sized masks (2048-4096) with vector 3 constants be an improvement?
Or perhaps setting up 3 materials that I use on all pieces? (2 panel colors, 1 emissive basically across all of the environment. Most detail is in the mesh itself.)
Textures just as meshes have LODs (mipmapping) so if the mesh is far away it will not yet load in the full size material until you get closer.
with the “texturecropping” node in ue4 mat editor you can make very small masks of one aspect of the whole material and place them correctly on the big diffuse.
this way a mask of 128/128 size can be applied correctly over the location of the diffuse where you need masks.
the tool for photoshop can be found here: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/CroppedEmissiveAssistant.html (note, for later photo shops you might need to remove any spaces in the files) this can significantly reduce memory.
especially since you can put one mask in each color channel.
this way you can store one masks in the R, G and B resulting in 3 masks in one small 128/128 texture.
I would also suggest to look at the meshes with 2048 textures to see if they still look good.
Hey thanks for the reply, I ended up studying the environment in the shooter level and noticed the architecture used base materials rather than unique versions for each mesh. This seemed like the best approach not only for development efficiency but also to keep things as uniform as possible. I appreciate you taking the time to reply though. =)