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Quick Texel density question and map resolutions

Development Discussion Content Creation
#1

Hey guys,

I know there’s been a lot of discussions out there about texel density and map sizes in UE4. After doing some research I found that they proposed a density of 8 for UT. Other places seem to say to tile a 1024 texture for every meter, giving you a density of like 10.24. So I don’t know if I’m going crazy here. By following the 8 density, A LOT of my larger architectural assets are needing 4K maps. Is this normal to have just a crud ton of 4K maps? I’ve been reading elsewhere and people are saying maps that big aren’t supposed to be that common on normal assets (except hero items). One example I have is this column base here:

Unfortunately you can see there’s unique normal maps needed for this one so I was hoping to not just slap a tiled shader on it. The problem is since the surface area is so big, I can’t really get it to fit neatly onto a 4K at the right density. So am I approaching this wrong? Should these all be ending up as 2K?

Here’s a texel video demonstration and you can see how many 4K maps the guy comes up with. Am I over thinking this?

Thanks in advance for any advice or help you can give me guys!

#2

That is not normal to use multitudes of 4k textures. You should aim at breaking down your environment a bit better and using tiling textures and trim sheets.

#3

There’s a lot of techniques to reuse textures. Detail textures, tiling textures, trim textures, “thirding” (tiling the middle with a top and bottom end piece), decals, vertex painting, world position offset, etc etc. For the most part walls and environments should be reusing as many textures as possible, with only hero pieces or props getting unique textures. For that piece, the general stone wall texture should be it’s own tiling texture, the top trim would be a tiling piece of a trim texture, that vent could also be thrown onto the trim sheet if there’s room and it’s always used with that wall texture. But if that vent is going to be used in different scenes not using that wall trim, you wouldn’t want to bundle them.

If you want unique corner detail, there’s some tricks you can do http://polycount.com/discussion/160794/the-ultimate-trim-technique-from-sunset-overdrive and http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2477025/#Comment_2477025

#4

I’ve found success using a 2k normal, and a mask map. I use one or more channels in the mask map to block out different parts of the texture for multiple detail maps and color. Then I use a surface detail normal map and a pattern detail normal map with different tiling. The pattern detail map is 256x256. There are a few other tricks to adding variation, but that usually gets me a nice looking material.