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Old 28th October 2009, 11:26 PM   #1
Merrie
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Default Texture Sizes

Could someone post some of their techniques for dealing with texturing objects in AC3D. For example I understand that the larger the object is the larger the map should be for detail but the range of sizes should not be larger then 1024 x 1024 sizes should be power of 2 for the textures.

Hope this makes sense. Thanks
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Old 29th October 2009, 12:52 PM   #2
Toronto
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Default Re: Texture Sizes

For most game applications you need texture sizes to follow this doubling pattern:
2048x2048
1024x1024
512x512
256x256
128x128
64x64
32x32
16x16
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Old 29th October 2009, 01:10 PM   #3
Merrie
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Default Re: Texture Sizes

Thank you for that, its helpful. A more specific question is, what are the guidelines for applying textures to objects. In other words, lets say I have a small house, oh lets go with 20 x 20 units, how do you judge what size texture to use on it?

Thank you!!
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Old 29th October 2009, 04:25 PM   #4
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Default Re: Texture Sizes

Merrie said:
>"what are the guidelines for applying textures to objects"

The larger the texture the more detailed, and clearer, it will look onscreen.
So if its for a game application then the larger textures will look clearer onscreen, but, these larger textures will lower your frames-per-second ingame, as the software must load these large textures to your videocard. So a fast action game with large textures might have poor frame rates (unless you have a state-of-the-art video card and computer).
If you are texturing a tree, or a house, in the distant background and use large 1024x1024 textures to make it clear, then you might end up with poor frame rates.
You need to optimize the texture size to how visible the object will be.

Hope that makes sense.

This discussion of frame rates also gets into other areas of; making textures with mipmaps, and changing lods.
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Old 29th October 2009, 06:54 PM   #5
lisa
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Default Re: Texture Sizes

A good rule of thumb is to look at how many pixels the object will take up in screen space.

e.g. Say you had a truck. The camera for your game is position so that the truck usually takes up about a quarter of the screen during game play. If your players are running their display at 1920×1080, then the texture for the truck needs to be a 512x512 map.

1920 x .25 = 480. Rounding up to the next power-of-two becomes 512.

The object is to get as close to 1 pixel of texture = 1 pixel of screen space without going over.

The smaller you can make your textures and get away with it, the better. Texture swaps can kill your frame rate even faster than polygon count in a lot of cases.
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