Cramming all textures into one, question

[Blackbird]

Hey, well here I tried to do what everyone else seems to do, supposedely to save FPS, meaning cram most of the textures of my building into one bmp.

Right away I notice a major decline in quality. Although I dont understand why there should be any change in quality at all.

Here is the texture of the clock tower, where its just one texture in one bmp. Look at the quality.

Now here is that same exact texture crammed into one bmp with all the other textures of my building. Now look at this horrible blurry mess.

The thing is I didnt change the dimensions of the clock tower, I took a 1024X1024 bmp and pasted my original texture into it, along with other textures. The dimensions of the clock tower texture didnt change, why is it so blurry? Is there a way around this?

If there isnt, I say forget this whole cramming textures thing, I am only making landmarks, and there will only be one of them in one city.

It wont affect FPS at all if I have 10 seperate textures for one building. I tried it. Its quality I care about first. Performance doesnt get affected at all in my case

 

[FelixFFDS]

The important thing, how does it look in the sim? I am under the impression that textures may not look best quality in the modelling program.

 

[Mace]

Right away I notice a major decline in quality.

"Decline in quality" in the Gmax viewport window. But there should be no decline in FS. Try it in the sim and verify.

My textures always look blurry in gmax; I think it must be due to the way gmax displays relatively large texture sizes.

But in the sim--they are sharp and nice looking, which is all that matters. I only use gmax/3dS viewport as a general guide.

 

[n4gix]

Felix and Rhett are correct. The Viewport renderer in GMax really stinks.

However, you may not have GMax set up for best display quality.

 

[Blackbird]

Well here I tried the texture of the clock tower in the game. Yea youre right, it looks pretty good.

Still though I did a little experiment. I have recently made 3 major buildings and a church, which have a total of 30 seperate bmp files. Now these are landmarks so they will only be placed once in the game.

I tested the FPS near those 3 buildings and the church. Remember they have 30 seperate bmp files. The FPS was 19.2 out of 24 max.

And when flying you don't notice any difference at all. And by the way without my buildings, the FPS is still only 21.2 or so out of 24 max.

So what I'm saying is it makes absolutely no difference towards performance if you have 2 bmp's or 12 bmp's for one building, if that building is placed only once in the game.

I think when it comes to landmarks, quality comes first, so there is no point in cramming all your textures into 1 bmp file and losing all that quality. Thats what I think.

If anything seems to affect performance its high numbers of polygons.

 

[Mace]

I think when it comes to landmarks, quality comes first, so there is no point in cramming all your textures into 1 bmp file and losing all that quality. Thats what I think.

From the way you talk, it sounds like you changed the sizes of some of the parts of your textures. There is no need to do that.

You do not have to compromise texture sheet usage vs. quality.

I would never do that as a designer, but on the other hand I could cram those textures on fewer sheets, and never lose any quality at all, because I would not reduce the size of things.

That clock face, for example--if it were 140 pixels across, I'd keep it at 140 pixels when I moved it to a larger texture sheet.

That way you won't spread/stretch out your texture at all--the model won't know the difference if you keep it the same width

 

[Mace]

Felix and Rhett are correct. The Viewport renderer in GMax really stinks.

However, you may not have GMax set up for best display quality.

Hmm is this some option in the Gmax config dialogs that I have missed?

Sometimes, it is useful to tweak UVW mapping by observing the viewport window--but it's poor resolution really precludes much practical use of that--

 

[n4gix]

Customize/Preference Settings/Configure Direct3D

Check on Enable Anit-ailiased Lines in Wireframe Views

Background Texture Size, click on 1024

Download Texture Size, click on 512

Texel Lookup - Anisotropic

MipMap Lookup - None

 

[Blackbird]

From the way you talk, it sounds like you changed the sizes of some of the parts of your textures. There is no need to do that.

You do not have to compromise texture sheet usage vs. quality.

I would never do that as a designer, but on the other hand I could cram those textures on fewer sheets, and never lose any quality at all, because I would not reduce the size of things.

That clock face, for example--if it were 140 pixels across, I'd keep it at 140 pixels when I moved it to a larger texture sheet.

That way you won't spread/stretch out your texture at all--the model won't know the difference if you keep it the same width

No, I didnt change the size of the texture. I did exactly what you said, I kept it at the same dimensions and copied it to a 1024X1024 bmp. Thats what I don't understand. If I do that, the quality should not change, but it did.

 

[Timmo]

remember FPS isnt the only measure of 'performance'!

Everytime your model calls a texture there is a delay while it goes away, finds it, loads it and displays it- The FPS mightnt be reduced much but the user may find your lovely model is untextured for a few seconds which ruins the immersion factor in the sim.

Further, that extra time spent accessing the HDD is time that isnt avaliable to load other textures (such as ground textures) which can lead to the dreaded 'blurries'

(I've always found the FSX-A F-18 and EH101 slow to load the textures....which is frustrating for the canopy glass since you cant see through it until the texture is loaded)

 

[Timmo]

Oh just to clarify also, if any of your original textures are compressed with a 'lossy' compression method (i.e. Jpeg) then the quality will reduce each time you edit/paste it and resave.

bitmaps and uncompressed tiffs dont really suffer from this of course

 

[Blackbird]

Oh and here is another problem with the cramming many textures into one bmp method. I cant do whats in the picture below with it.

You see how the UVW causes that section with the 2 windows to repeat until it turns into 6 windows. Now if I had another texture right next to my wall section, it would interfere with that.

If someone knows how I can still do that with the many textures in one bmp method, please tell me.

You see I have nothing against this strange method for texturing buildings, as long as it can still do the same things as having one bmp for each seperate texture can do.

This method is strange to me, because I'm used to texturing models for other games. It all seemed so much easier.

 

[arno]

Hi,

Repeating the texture is probably the only case where you might need more texture sheets. You can not repeat only part of a texture, so therefore these parts need a separate texture most of the time.

In all other cases it is better to put as much on one sheet as possible. Although you might not notice much of a difference, the total amount of drawcalls does matter. And besides that also the disk access while loading the files as already mentioned.

Even for landmarks that are only placed ones it will make a difference if you have 10 drawcalls or only 1. Having a city on screen that can save hundreds of drawcalls on the total scene and that is something you will notice.

It may be different if you are used to do it in another way, but that does not mean it is weird. If you think about everything that happens behind the scene while rendering it makes a lot of scene to handle your textures like this.

 

[Blackbird]

Well okay, you convinced me.

I dont want to redo the other 3 buildings I made, but from now on I will try this method where possible.