Texture map sizes

[jeb]

if you are doing extreme close up of face or hands. its no over kill. if character will apear as full or half body shots, then it is overkill. your texture size shoul work with the amount of closeup you want.

[leigh]

Well, it really depends on what your final output is going to be.
On average, with my characters, I try to keep the textures between 2000x2000 and 3000x3000, but that is because my computer is hardly a supercomputer, and when you have 20 or 30 of those size images, it slows down renders big time.

When working for film output, your sizes should be even bigger than that.

So my question is this: How big is too big for a high-res full character texture map? I would like to go 3000x3000 or even 4k x 4k. Is this Overkill?

What do you mean by a "full character texture map" - I hope you aren't going to try and map an ENTIRE character with one image! Unless it's a very low poly game model...

To decide on texture map size, you need to know exactly what your output size will be (in your case, you mentioned that size already).

To quote from my book I am writing:

The best way to do this is to roughly work out what the largest size that any portion of the texture will appear on-screen will be. If, for instance, you are texturing a face that is seen full-screen at any point in time, then you want to make sure that your texture maps that are used on the face will look good if they fill the screen. If the camera zooms into the face, and there is a close-up shot of, for example, the characters mouth, you are going to have to ensure that the image maps for the face are so large that they will look good even when only that small portion of them is viewed full-screen.

If this latter shot were to be broadcast on television at a resolution of 720x576 pixels, then you would have to consider that the image maps used on the face are going to have to be large enough to ensure that the textures around the mouth will look fine even though they will fill the entire screen. This means that your texture maps for the entire face are going to have to be pretty big, to be sure that just the section around the mouth does not look jagged or blurry.

Once you have roughly ascertained the largest size that any portion of the image map will appear on the screen, you can work out an appropriate size by then multiplying that size by two, and working out the size of the entire map like that.

To illustrate that a little simpler, let us assume that you are texturing a human face, and that the largest the face appears in the final cut is in a shot where the face fills the screen. This means that the entire image map for the face will appear at a size of 720x576 pixels at this point. The safest way to then calculate an appropriate size for the image maps for the face would then be to multiply 720 pixels by two, to get the total of 1440 pixels. If you were to be texturing this face with UV maps, which are always square-shaped, you would then ensure that you make all your UV mapped images at a minimum size of 1440x1440 pixels.

Obviously, as illustrated previously, this calculation can be a little trickier if there are any major close-ups involved.
Let us return now to the previous example of the mouth close-up. Let us therefore assume that in the close-up shot of the mouth, approximately one third of the face will appear on the screen.

This means that one third of the face will be appearing at a size of 720x576 pixels, and that therefore the image map for that area of the face has to be at least twice that size, for that area alone. This means that in order to ensure that the image map remains crisp at such a close-up, you will need to firstly multiply that number by three, to get the total size (at a one-to-one ration) for the image maps for the entire face, and then double it to get a safe size, to ensure that the quality remains acceptable. This means that your safest bet for the size of your image maps for that face would therefore be 4320x4320 pixels.

Although using this double image size is highly recommended for the best clarity possible for your textures, you may find that your computer may not always be able to handle such large images, especially if you are going to be rendering for film, in which case your image sizes are going to be huge.

[VShane]

Love Leigh's stuff, so clean so concise ....she rocks:airguitar

The maps I am working on right now are 5K x 5K only on one figure because of its extreme closeup, the others are about 3k x 3k. The models are averaging about 42K.

WK

[Abominable]

Check out what Alex has to say, this and Leigh's words should get you happily on your way...

www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/texture_res/texture_res.html (http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/texture_res/texture_res.html)

[MikeRhone]

Thanks for the responces everyone. I understood the theory of texture resolution to TV in my own way, but waaay back in the day I was told that I should never do textures over 2k by 2k.:surprised

As now I am older and (possibly) wiser, I found that was hindering me a bunch. Im glad that everyone has cleared everything up for me.

thx again!

:buttrock:

Mike R

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