How to make high resolution textures with G.I.M.P

[Mcdoye]

i want to learn how to make 2k 4k textures and i cant seem to find a easy guide anywhere online.....

 

 

i have a mod called walther ppk nv and im wanting to give it a higher resolution texture.. and probably all my other weapon mods.

 

 

[madmongo]

There's no magic easy button for this. Conceptually it's pretty simple. Just go into GIMP and resize the image to your new resolution. Then use that resized image as a template for your new artwork so that you don't have to change the image's UV map. The hard part is creating the new artwork to layer on top of the existing texture so that you actually have a higher resolution image. With real-world weapons like the Walther PPK, you can probably find high resolution (or high enough resolution) images online that you can then copy parts off of, then adjust the brightness/contrast/hue/etc to get all of the bits from different images to match. Then maybe do a bit of image editing to hide the seams from where different images were cobbled together. There's no simple guide because it's not a simple thing to do, and it's more about artistic skill than anything else.

 

You will also need to expand your normal map out to 4k.

 

Be careful using high resolution textures. Fallout New Vegas is an old 32 bit game. By default it's going to be limited to 2 GB of RAM. You can extend that to 4 GB with the 4 GB patch (which the GOG version already has), but that's as far as you can go. Even if your PC has oodles and oodles of RAM, FNV can't ever use more than 4 GB of it. A lot of that memory is taken up by the game itself and world and object data, so your textures don't have that full 4 GB available.

 

A 4k texture is going to take up about 64 MB of RAM. Add in a 4k normal map and now that's 128 MB just for one texture set. All you need is about 20 or 30 objects with 4k textures displayed on-screen to run the game completely out of memory.

 

Fallout New Vegas's texture caching system also leaks memory. This is one of the reasons that the game will run slower and slower until it finally crashes if you play the game continuously for long periods of time. Using higher resolution textures makes the game leak more memory faster, so you'll reach the crash point sooner.

 

My personal advice is save the 4k textures for 64 bit games.