Texturing Advice

[Triforce1]

I recently finished a rather large static object for use in Oblivion, and I want to texture it. It is essentially a giant rock, meant to be used as a large floating island. Because it was meant to be a chunk of terrain where none could be actually generated, it has a pretty high poly count, about 27K tri's. A quick search of the Nexus tells me this number is acceptable, (by comparison to, say, an armor I found that professes to have over 86K tri's) if to only more well-equipped PC's. As it is meant for terrain, I intend to texture it in vanilla land textures, the same tiling ones found in the terrain editor. I can do that, no problem. However, I have a few questions, and to the half of you who are still reading this, thanks, because I thought a little / lot of background was in order. :p Now, to business.

 

1) How large should the texture map be? I understand the scaling rule, but the largest I've seen are high resolution LOD textures 4096x4096 in size. What would you recommend the size of my map be? A single texture for this object would be preferred, so what do you think?

 

2) When I wrote this, I thought I had another question. Now, I guess not. So, if anyone has anything interesting to say, then please do tell me. ;)

 

Thanks a ton.

[Dracula420]

how big is the object? the bigger it is the bigger and therefore more detailed texture is needed. although 2048 x 2048 is usually large enough.

[Triforce1]

Well, I have a feeling it won't matter anyway, thank you. :( See, to give you a good picture representation, I threw a high resolution rock texture (turned out to be about 1024x1024) onto it, added some serious collision (so you could walk on it), and dropped it into the game world in the air next to the Imperial City. As it is, it takes up a few square cells, I'd say about the same surface size or bigger than the Imperial City itself. But the issue is, the game lagged ridiculous while I was in the cells it occupied (and it was loaded and visible, of course). Completely and totally unplayable. And the texture would still need to be far better than just 1024 square, I can see that. I'm not sure what specifically caused this lag, in truth, because a similarly sized texture of vanilla quality caused no lag at all. So, I assume texture. There is no picture to judge scale because I could not take one, the lag was so bad. So, if anyone has any ideas on how to fix this, thank you. Otherwise, I'll just have to figure out something else.

[TodaY]

If it is as big as the imperial isle, I think you're trying to make an isle that simply exsists out of one rock. Believe me, that's impossible. You should try heightmapping for that ;P It's pretty easy so don't worry ;]

[Triforce1]

Leave it to someone else to beat into my head something that really should be obvious to begin with. The more I think about it, the more I'm liking the idea of just making a new, small world space and mapping that out instead. The performance hit on that rock was ridiculous as it was. And, perhaps, we can forget about the crazy idiot who tried to build a flying island out of a huge freaking rock? Thanks so much. :p

[theRoadstroker]

The Reason for that huge performance hit was not because of your texture , it was because of your model and your collision data, Im going to assume that you did not optimize your collision data/mesh at all and kept the full 27K polys/tris and that forces the game to calculate and think of 27K surfaces constantly (which is insane and why it is unplayable). A 27K polys/Tris single object/mesh is pretty expensive/heavy for the computer alone to handle, I would suggest to create a large piece of rock within the 3-4k poly limit or split the large rock into 3 pieces then have smaller rocks (within 2-3k ) IE: 6-10 rocks scattered randomly to break of the low - poly feeling, some might say that : " - isn't 10 smaller rocks with 3k (10 x 3k = 30k) more expansive for your computer? " and the answer is No , and Im not 100% why it is like that , but I will have to guess that it has something to do with objects being calculated per say. Anyway back to your large rock and collision , the collision is prolly the most expansive mesh type you can add to the game so you will need to keep it ridiculously low, to give you an example: a sword with 2-3k polys would work perfectly with a collision box with 4 polys if you got the size right , so in order to get the best results is to keep the mesh low and to keep it higher where you think the player spends most of his/hers time IE: Your floating rock will prolly wont need that detailed collision underneath it since you prolly wont be able to stand or to go there at all so you might even get away with making no collision there at all if it helps keep the mesh low (but the mesh still needs to be enclosed).

 

About your texture sizes , its really up to you and your Computer or if you planning to release it to the public - do you want more people to play your mod and enjoy it or do you want only people with high - end computers to enjoy your mod? ... the bigger the textures the more expensive they are.

 

(In theory : each next texture size should make 4x better texture. Fact: Each higher texture size will make 4 times the impact on your video memory for that texture. )

 

256x256 = good small texture

 

512x512 = (one of the best texture sizes, good detail and low size) 2x better texture

 

1024x1024 = (also one of the best texture sizes , Just enough detail 90% of the time , medium size) 1 x better detail then 512

 

2048x2048 = (Better detail but not as much as you would have expected , poor "detail vs size") 0.5 x better surface then 1024

 

4096x4096 = (Same as above , Really poor "detail vs size" , I don't see any need for this size unless you need to have something really really close the the view or something really really big) 0.25 better then 2048

 

So take your pick.

 

Good luck

 

-Road