what is the best size to doing texture?

[gorillajin]

I am not a professional, but I think it depends on what you are trying to archive.
Some movie companies use 4k map or even larger maps for a model. If you are trying to make a game scene, usually it's 512 or 1024 map. For films, you can use over 2k maps, but it really depends on what you are trying to do.
I am sure somebody can give better advice on this.

[DanGrover]

If your map is never going to fill the screen, it never needs to be larger than the resolution of your final renders! Well, this isn't quite true - an object might not fill the screen, but if 4/5ths of its UV map isn't visible to the camera then the bit that remains may well be smaller than the final resolution, and may cause some blurring. As Gorillajin said, it really depends on what you're trying to do - It's a trade off between a number of things:

- RAM Usage: Higher resolution textures = more RAM usage! This is never a good thing, though if it's not crashing or having to page-file too much of it (cache it to the hard disk) it shouldn't matter too much - it's just worth bearing in mind! Also, remember, that JPEGs won't help you here - when any kind of image is put into most render engines, it's reduced to a bitmapped image, so a 8bit-per-channel RGB, 1024x1024 map will always use the same volume of RAM, irrespective of its input format.
- Render Usage: Higher resolution textures = more samples needed to anti-alias it, filter it and whatnot. This is also true of things like displacement maps, and especially opacity maps! Keep your opacity maps low-res - it'll rarely make a visual difference unless you're very close, but raytracing shadows through them is an absolute killer when it comes to rendering.
- Available Material: Unless you're prepared to get really down and dirty with Photoshop, often times you might be limited to whatever source material you can find for your resolution - that is, if you're trying to make a super-high resolution leaf texture, but the highest resolution image of a leaf you can find is 2k, you're sort of buggered (unless you grab a camera and get snapping yourself!)

With all these things in mind, it's never going to look worse with a higher resolution map, so within these constraints, make them as high as you can. You just need to balance it with render time, RAM usage, time to create them, and ultimately whether or not it's visually worth this extra time.

[HapZungLam]

Well said DanGrover.

Add on to that. If you are going to render for HD, if your texture has a lot of gradients (either by a smooth command from Photoshop or a big fall off from light to gray) You should create those gradient at 16 bits colour. Cuz 8 bits will really show the lacking of levels of gradiention in HD.

To give you a more solid value of your texture map. Assuming you are final render in HD 1080P. Your UV is splitted into 2 maps. 1 map for your head(since it'll be a bit of closeups) another map for your torso and the rest of the body.

The maximum close up will be the full size of the head. Your maps size should be :

1. Since 1080p is 1920x1080
2. You may have some negatives space of your UV (negative space includ the back of your geo)
3. You may zoom in slightly closer than the size of the front face.


The texture for you head should be a least 1920x1920 x 2 = 3840x 3840. I like to mutiply my resolution to some what closer to the power of 1024 (because some of the appz will have problems calculating non hexadecimal value) Maybe as well just round it up as 4096x4096. Another 4092x4092 for the torso. Unless you are going to zoom into the shoe, etc. Then just x2 of your final output to be save.

[scrimski]

http://www.leighvanderbyl.com/pdf/size_does_count.pdf

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