Can you increase or decrease Texture size without losing work?

#1

Hey all,

Would like advice from CG veterans on texturing pipeline.
I would like to test how much my current PC can render

But I dont want to waste texture work in MARI by doing a full face in 2k then want to go to 4k.
Coming from Photoshop I know for sure than increasing size is always worse.

Is that the same here?
If I wanted to test the limits of my CPU should I go and start textures at 16k then I can drop down to 8k and 4k easily if I wanted to without losing work?

#2

You know that traditional up-sizing isn’t going to look any better, but if you just want to test your rig why not give it a shot? Also maybe look into something like Reshade (image enlargement, not Post-FX) or Topaz Labs’ AI Gigapixel which can give the impression of more detail/crispness when up-sizing your textures.

#3

Well the thing is that Im currently about to start texturing and wanted to decide if doing it in 8k or 2k first would be better in terms of being able to test down and up the resolution ladder

But Im guessing 3d texture maps work similar to 2D paintings in that anything high res will go low res perfectly while low res has a hard time going high res right?

Btw for a pc like mine,
Would I be able to run a portrait bust textured in a resolution 16k+?

CPU) Ryzen 7 1700X EightCore Processor 3.4 GHz
GPU) GTX 1060
RAM) 32GB
W10 64-bit

#4

Substance can do that, if you want to adjust your textures higher after doing all of your work, it can go through the process of reapplying all of your work at a higher resolution, even direct painting.

#5

Do you know any programs that can do the opposite and make it lower?

#6

Substance can do that too, though so can any image editing program, all you would be doing is lowering the resolution, the real difficulty is trying to increase the resolution of a texture after you’ve painted it, but Substance stores all of your actions and can repeat them to switch to higher or lower resolution textures.

#7

Woah thats amazing, but wouldnt that mean theres a huge history log = can cause teh system to run slow?

And with substance then that means theres really no danger at all in painting lower res cus it can make a perfect copy through repeating your actions…thats amazing

#8

It doesn’t slow it down while working, but it does take some time to process when changing resolutions.