Assorted Texture Questions

[greendragoon]

I have a couple of texture questions.

1. Back in 3D school, many years ago, we were taught that it was better to make your textures square because it was more efficient in the renderer. The renderer also liked textures with multiples of 8 best, i.e. 256x256, 512x512, etc. Is this the case with Plasma? Is it better to have a square texture, or does it not make a difference?

2. Is there a rule of thumb for texture sizes, i.e. use this size if your up close, or do not exceed this size?

[Nadnerb]

1) Plasma will only accept textures with power of 2 sizes. However, the plugin will automatically rescale any texture images you use to power of 2 sizes when it exports, so this really isn't necessary information for the user, unless you're very concerned about the per-pixel accuracy of your textures.

2) Do what works best for you. The only thing you'll want to be careful of is the total filesize of your age, since textures often make up most of that.

[GPNMilano]

I have a couple of texture questions.

2. Is there a rule of thumb for texture sizes, i.e. use this size if your up close, or do not exceed this size?

Generally it goes like this: Sky Textures/Matte Paintings for backgrounds are larger file sizes 1024x1024 or 1024 x 512 is generally the norm.

The majority of other textures in Uru fall in the 512x 256 or 256x 256 category. This is the major stuff your avatar will see up close. floors, railings, rock, wood etc.

Smaller stuff stuff is for lens flares, lightmaps etc. (For instance, Cyan's lightmaps are 128x128 while the lensflares are 64x64.

Hope that helps.

[greendragoon]

Thanks, that answers my questions beautifully.