CGTalk - Resizing question

bonestructure

11-16-2007, 04:06 PM

I've been working on a model I hope to sell, a very simple one that's been uv unwrapped and mapped. Other people have made the same model, but no one seems to have taken much care as far as texturing. My problem is, this is the kind of thing that, like books on a bookshelf, you'd have several of them in the scene. So I've been making multiple textures for it, and by the time I'm finished I'll have at least 150 different textures. Which sounds more tedious than it is, really. My problem is, I have a habit of making all my UV maps 1000 X 1000 and with only about half the textures done, I have like 50 megs of maps, even in jpeg. I'm wondering, if I reduce them in size to maybe 800 X 800, will it save me much in size, and will it damage the textures, provided they start out at the larger size? I know I'll still have several megs of textures and all, I just want to save a little size without loosing quality.

Mr. D

11-20-2007, 06:44 PM

Hello

best advice would be to first go through your textures and decide what really needs to be that large (ex: a decal on the car's glove box could in all likelihood be smaller) if its not that important, or will not be render at some form of close up make it smaller.

on your large size if your going to use it try a 1024x1024 instead of 1000x1000. reason being if your hoping to sell to the gaming industry textures are powers of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32...1024), making your texture easier to resize as needed.

also decide if everything needs to be texture, or can you use a shader instead, or supply both with your model.

Mr. D

bonestructure

11-20-2007, 08:20 PM

well, these are basically DVD covers. Anyone can model a DVD box, but not that many people are gonna go to the trouble of making a couple hundred assorted textures for the cover. Not really to sell for gaming, just to try to catch a couple bucks here and there, mostly on the strength of having a LOT of assorted textures for it. Some are high rez, some aren't. While shrinking would probably help the lower rez textures, not sure how it affects the others, or in an overall sense. Usually shrinking makes images sharper. I'm just not sure if that applies as far as 3D textures go.

Marcel

11-21-2007, 08:47 AM

I wonder if you should worry about the size in the first place? I mean, the difference between downloading 80MB or 150MB is 2 minutes for most people, so I'd go for the maximum quality.

If you would downscale the images the quality wouldn't suffer much I think.

Which file format are you storing them? If it is for rendering I would not use JPG to store them. Not because of the loss in quality (hardly noticeable) but because it takes much longer to load 50 JPGs than to load 50 TGAs.

On thing you should probably do is create a seperate model of 50 DVDs back to back, with a single texture. Most people will want to fill bookcases full of DVDs, so it'll be nice to have an optimized version with only one texture especially for this. Perhaps you already thought of this :)

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