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Hey folks

This isn't really my specialised subject in game authoring, so any help would be greatly appreciated. I've searched the forum but to no avail, so here are my queries:

1) Texture Maps - How many? I have heard that using one single bitmap with all your desired images and then UV mapping specific parts of the bitmap to certain polygons will be more friendly on the graphics memory than using an individual bitmap for each image, even if the sum of the dimensions were the same.

2) What would be the recommended dimensions for this map(s)?

3) Animated textures? Is PLAY ANIMATION TO IMAGE suitable, even for transparency?

These enquiries apply both to low-poly object modelling and level modelling in the .x format.

Again, thanks for any help.

CompleXity

I am not a coder, neither know dbpro.

But, in general, in most engines... :

1) Dunno if is for the card memory, but yes, use to be way more efficient. As well as have most possible meshes welded, delete all the faces that are not seen, try two faces not almost-overlap (depends on engine)..etc.

2) I have heard best is powers of 2 however. But depends on engine I suppose. And size...in ut2k3 it was better 512 as maximun for uncompressed textures, 1024 and higher with certain compression(quality loose) format.

Your right, a single texture map is faster and more efficient than single ones - you should only use seperate textures when you need to do something fancy like change a facial expression. If you wanted to have different faces, you'd keep the head as a seperate mesh and texture it with it's own image - that way you can change the head texture without affecting the rest of the model. The exception would be a level model - where it's easier to use numerous different textures.

The resolution depends on your game engine - RTS games can get away with really tiny textures, but a FPS really needs at least 512x512 textures to get any real detail. There is no real need to go above that - you'd simply limit your engine performance dealing with huge images like that. Plus Lithunwrap exports 512x512 UV map templates, and it's always a good idea to use them.

For animated texture, I suggest you simply store each image and manually texture with code - I like to be in control of things like that - I don't really trust the fancy AVI style anim commands on my models - I reckon they'd be slow and give really crud mipmapping .


Van-B

Fantastic! Just the advice I was looking for. Many thanks to both of you. Have a kiwi

Cheers

CompleXity