optimal texture sizes

[sarkun]

Hi there,

I\'m new to the modding thing and I was wondering - what is the best texture size for KSP? Lets assume I have a part roughly the size of a standard tank - how big the texture file should be? is 1024x1024 optimal? Or is it overkill?

cheers

[Omnivore]

Depends on both model complexity and level of detail. Most liquid fuel tank models I\'ve seen really don\'t need any more than 256x256. Attached is an example of a high level of detail LFT model (roughly 1750 vertices), the texture size is 512x512. In my opinion 1024x1024 is overkill in the majority of cases.

[Killerhurtz]

From what I have seen, either 256x256 or 512x512 look like a standard for pretty much all parts size, but if you want to make a low-res or just don\'t want to put much detail, 128 should be fine (64x64 for the REALLY low res). Should it be the other way around, 1024 is still acceptable, but 2048 is just too much.

There\'s only ONE hard restriction, though: each side MUST be a power of two (or was it factor? Pretty sure it was power...). So if you\'ve got a long part, you could stretch it over 512x256, or 1024x512.

Also, the number of vertices/tris shouldn\'t affect the choice, only the size of the part itself.

Anyone correct me if I\'m wrong, please.

[Omnivore]

Size of part has nothing to do with it, it\'s all about the level of detail and uvmapping of faces to textures. A low level of detail cylinder could be done with both few vertices/faces and a very small texture map. How many pixels do you need to represent a solid color mapped to a triangle?

The higher the level of mesh detail, the more vertices, and the more unique sets of faces to map into the texture which requires more texture real estate. The higher the resolution required on a particular face or set of faces the more texture real estate required. Whether the detail is in the mesh or the texture it still is a good indicator of how big a texture map you\'re going to need. Higher detail equals larger texture size.

[Nuke]

the power of 2 requirement is usually required for mipmap generation. mipmaps for those that dont know are a set of textures that are progressively scaled down from the original texture using division by 2. as you divide down using integer math you cant have any remainders because that will ruin the alignments. the idea is you dont need to render the full texture for objects that are far away, so you use a lower mip level while rasterizing those objects. its sometimes possible to have non-square textures so long as both dimensions are powers of 2, but this depends on what the developer decides to do (im not sure if ksp supports this, i usually err on the side of caution and use powers of 2).

you might have other restrictions imposed by texture formats. if you use any kind of block compression (like dxt*) your resolution must be divisible by 4. of course if you have power of 2 textures you are almost always divisible by 4.

now ive modded several games over the last decade and a half. what i usually do is make textures at about 4* the desired resolution, and down sample them for release. ive seen graphics card caps quadruple during the development of a mod, and i like to future proof my textures. it would be foolish to release full size textures though.