Sorry for the somewhat arbitrary title but I’m wondering if this is a straight forward question.
Is it better to have a static mesh that has one large 4k map or multiple materials that use one or two 1k maps that tile multiple times over the mesh? Is either a better method for optimising texture streaming memory?
It might be arbitrary on a small scale but if it’s worth baking textures to bring into Unreal over multiple materials then that’d be great to know.
Apologies if this has been brought up often, it occurred to me today but then I am using an old 8800 card.
Probably the latter. Two 1k maps are going to be 1/8th the total resolution of a single 4k map, and you want to save that memory for something else later. It’ll cost a little more per-pixel instead, but if that’s how significant it is, it’s worth it.
Multiple materials increase the number of draw calls. If you’re wanting to use multiple tiled textures then I’d use some texture masks so define which part of the material gets which tiled texture so that you can use low-resolution maps while also using one material.
So there seems to be two opinions here. I understand the resolution advantage of a 1K map tiling but if that same material is being called 20 times over 20 meshes (along with other materials) then would it not be better to have a larger 2 or 3K texture baked for the entire object and reduce the draw calls for the scene?