texture sizes?

Discuss the construction of maps and the tools to create maps for 3D games.
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ceriux
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texture sizes?

Post by ceriux »

when making a texture what is the best size to make things at?

for like

floor
walls
ceiling
ect...
Spike
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Post by Spike »

Just make all your textures 4096*4096 and you'll have enough detail for pretty much everything.

floor/ceiling textures can get away with repeating more often than walls.

3dfx cards are limited to 256*256 textures. but who uses a 3dfx card nowadays?

if you're making a wad image, if you make it big then scale it down, you get a higher resolution lightmap.

Really it depends which era of gaming you're aiming for. :P
ceriux
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Post by ceriux »

well when making a wad for worldcraft the thing that converts the wad to be usable in worldcraft has a limit on how big the texture can be i "think" its 512x512 im not sure. im not worried about making higher resolution textures because later on ill be making higher resolution tga's .
Spike
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Post by Spike »

in wads, texture sizes dictate two things.
firstly: you get one lightmap sample per 16 texture pixels. a 64*64 texture will thus have 4*4 lightmap samples (actually, (4+1)*(4+1), but hey).
secondly: the sizes define the default repeat tesselation of any replacement textures.

Thus, if you make your wad images too big, you will generally have to make your tga images huge, as each one will have to cover more wall.

Personally I wouldn't make a wad texture larger than 256*256.
Floor texture sizes very much depends upon your intended content, and how much its meant to appear to repeat.

Bear in mind that I'm neither a mapper nor artist, so take my words with a pinch of salt.
ceriux
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Post by ceriux »

it seems to be good advice though, especially seeing what goes behind some of the stuff that happens with texture sizes, so would you say for better shadows larger textures are better or smaller?
mh
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Post by mh »

Please please please: when you're making textures make sure that their sizes are powers of 2. They don't have to be square, but please make sure that they're a power of 2 in either dimension. I mean 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc.

Reason why is for best compatibility with 3D hardware. Previous generations of hardware were restricted to powers of 2, and if you want your textures to be usable and look their best on the most possible machines, you would do well to restrict yourself to these sizes. Otherwise the engine will likely run them through a fast but crap resampling algorithm.

I know this should go without saying, but you'd be surprised how many releases don't follow this guideline. Even Rygel's texture pack contains textures with crazy sizes like 503 x 647.
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Spirit
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Post by Spirit »

Improve Quaddicted, send me a pull request: https://github.com/SpiritQuaddicted/Quaddicted-reviews
mh
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Post by mh »

That's a bit out of date though, and a lot of advice in it will break for modern engines. Specific items I'm thinking are:
  • Most modern GL engines actually do support fullbrights so avoid these colours unless you're intending to use them.
  • Most modern engines have resolved the cache mismatch error, but it's still good practice to follow the advice.
  • The released GLQuake source imposes a maximum texture size of 640x480, to be more precise.
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