[WMCoolmon]

Try DDS textures as well, for fighters they're supposed to be pretty good.

[DaBrain]

Originally posted by Bobboau
you know the dimentions of the texture need to be power of two but the texture does not need to be square so 2048*1024 is just fine, so if you have two 1024 textures, just squash the first texture's coords to one side and the other texture's coords to the other, then just expand the canvas size of the first texture and paste the second onto the side of it, and tada! done.

and yes larger textures meen slower passes, it's like this, a render pass takes about five years, if you double the size of the map it takes six years, so what's slower six years or ten years?

Damn.... I said I knew enough about maps... but I wasn't able to find this simple solution.

Well I have no choice: "I have to learn more about maps."

[Roanoke]

And 2 maps should be no problem for HT&L.

[Nico]

Originally posted by Bobboau
then just expand the canvas size of the first texture and paste the second onto the side of it, and tada! done.

And tada! Redo your UV mapping

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by Roanoke
And 2 maps should be no problem for HT&L.

And who cares about FPS? Let's just max out all our ships to 8 textures...

[KARMA]

Originally posted by Nico


And tada! Redo your UV mapping

well it's trivial to adjust the uvmaps when they are "regular", like in this case. You can do that in 2 minutes in lithunwrap and, i guess, in any other uveditor.
BTW, bob, my question is if the render time is mmm addictive or linear, I mean: we know that fso likes few high res maps, and for each single ship it is better to have a single map, but what happen if you overuse the ram memory with various too much high res textures? In other words, isn't there the risk, when the game has to work with some dozens of high res maps,to have your system going choppyer due to consumed memory?the difference in terms of mem usage isn't that small between a 2048 and a 1024 maps

[Bobboau]

"fso likes few high res maps"
close, FSO likes few maps, it consiters one high res map a lesser evil than two low res maps.

with fewer maps you are less likely to have a swapout problem, and when you do swap out a texture you do it all at once, it's all about makeing the smallest number posable of big batches, and to a lesser degree changeing the smallest number of things posable.

[WMCoolmon]

Well, if you have two 1024x1024 maps, and a 2048x1024, the latter will actually use somewhat less RAM as the overhead of loading one texture is less than that of loading two textures.

[General Kazooie]

Originally posted by KARMA

well it's trivial to adjust the uvmaps when they are "regular", like in this case. You can do that in 2 minutes in lithunwrap and, i guess, in any other uveditor.
 

What do you mean by regular? I´m really interested to learn anything I can about UVmapping, since it seems everyday I´ve got to do more of it... I´ve done UVmapping mostly by selecting faces and applying a uvmap modifier( in most cases planar) and then doing the same for all the other polys...

[Boomer]

Uhhh.  Not to derail the thread or anything, but does anyone know where I can get a copy of Lithium Unwrap?  I googled and found nothing but bleedy reviews.

[karajorma]

Check the modding section of my FAQ.

[KARMA]

Originally posted by General Kazooie


What do you mean by regular? I´m really interested to learn anything I can about UVmapping, since it seems everyday I´ve got to do more of it... I´ve done UVmapping mostly by selecting faces and applying a uvmap modifier( in most cases planar) and then doing the same for all the other polys...

this is what I do in lithunwrap. There are other unwrapers which do almost the same, and I know that max has one internal. If you want lithunwrap, follow karajoma's instruction above.
1- create the desired texture in photoshop out of all the smaller textures and load the model in lithunwrap
2-create a new lith material and assign the new texture to it
3-for each original material, I select all the uvs and assign em to the new material
4-each time I do so, I scale the uvs by the same scale of the original texture compared to the new one. I mean that if the original texture is 1/4 of the new texture, I scale the corresponding uvs to 25%, then I move them in the correct position (either manually or automatically, depending by the situation)
5-I continue until all the faces are assigned to the new material, then I delete the old ones, save, save a backup, save a second backup:p, load the model in tuespace and make the smoothgroups.
Note about smoothgroups: I can't remember now if ts see as different materials the different lith materials, in that case it'd be easyer in lith to make many materials (one for each group) with the same new texture. Elseway you'd have to make many materials anyway, but before saving substitute from each material the texture with a solid colour or with some casual textures: this way, when you load the model in TS, you won't have to select manually the various faces to create the smoothgroup

Of course, baking textures in max is faster, if you can do it, and all of this procedure is faster and has a sense if you can make some regular subdivision of space (like a single 1024x1024 out of 4 512x512, or 1 1024x512 out of 8 256x256 or something like that)