Hi,
I’m uvw mapping and texturing a 2042 face 1st person weapon for a fps mod. The map is going to be about 1024x1024 for the whole gun.
Should I be using multiple smaller textures?
Is loading one large texture going to slow the gameplay down?
I’m using 3dsmax, and this is meant to run on the source engine when it’s out.
Thanks.
Video memory is consumed by the number of pixels in an image (so to speak and not counting any of the newest compression methods out there (dds, etc)). So a no matter how many KB in size the file is a 1024 x 1024 image consumes, it will use the same amount of video memory as any other 1024 x 1024 image. Keeping this in mind, if you can use multiple textures, then add up the pixels of all the textures and see if you use less than 1024 x 1024. If so, then you may be able to save a bit of video card memory. If not, then you might was well stick with the 1024 x 1024.
okay, I pretty much have the1024x1024 map packed, I think I used about 98% of the uvw space.
Thanks
As a counterpoint to that…
Some engines prefer fewer larger textures as each texture that is in memory has a slew of anscillary data that is associated with it that in some of them is not trivial in size. Just something to be aware of.
-L
okay, so many textures increases the amount of data processed, but the size of the texture also increases processing speed?
So say three 512x512 maps would be slower than one 1024x1024?, but 3 256x256 mpas would be faster?
Better to use just 1 texture, as each time you use more than one, you cause duplications of verts. However, if you can borrow sections of textures from other elements in your scene, then you can try to take advantage of cache.
so like using the same metal texture used on a map’s walls on the barrel of a gun?
I assume not many games these days do that?
The things you need to pay attention to are:
Overall Texture Resolution
The resolution of a texture will indicate how much video memory an image will take up. a 1024x1024 with alpha takes about 4 megs of video memory. This doesn’t get compressed.
Each texture may have additional information associated with it, depending on your engine, so that can affect why you’d want to keep the number of textures down. UT2k4 is like this.
So if you’ve got 16 1024x1024 maps in one scene, and only 32 megs of video memory, that would mean you’d need to send 32 megs of textures over the AGP/PCIX bus every frame to render that scene. That would slow your scene down considerably. However, once an image gets onto a card, that image stays there until the card fills up or you wipe the card (quitting the game, whatever). When the card fills up, the oldest texture used gets dropped to make room.
And if you’ve got 128 128x128 maps in one scene, you’re going to use 64 megs of memory again, but you might have 128 other snippets of information that needs to be processed by the processor.
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