[TrashMan]

What approach to take?

I'm thinking of fully UV mapping the Archangel, and I initially thought that two 2048x2048 textures (one for each half of the ship) might be enough...but give that it's a 4,5+ km ship...that gives me a surface area of 1024 pixels per kilometer of ship...whish in really not enough IMHO.

Are 4096x4096 textures too large? Should I use more textures? I'm not sure.....

[The E]

You can safely use 4096^2 as your base texture size. Once you release the model though, I would recommend giving out 2048^2 maps for those poor souls stuck on Intelgrated crap.

[MatthTheGeek]

For large ships, 4096² is pretty standard nowadays. Newer MVP ships (Hattie) and optimized BP ships (Solaris, Optirayana) use textures of this size without any issues. All those use 2048² textures in the default VPs but the 4096 ones in their respective advanced VPs.

[TrashMan]

Really? That's good news I guess...

Now..to actually make two textures of that size....

[Rga_Noris]

... The Hattie does not use any 4096^2 textures.

[Droid803]

Esarai uses 4096^2's for fighters.
That's right.
Fighters.

Not implying in any way that that is sensible (it's not).

Which reminds me that I should probably go through and whip out the friggin' shrinkhammer on all of those textures so my textures folder isn't several GBs.

[Nuke]

ive been using 4096^2 textures on up to corvette sized ships with much success. theres always the possibility of using more than one, but that should be used rarely if ever considering the memory usage.

[Black Wolf]

Trashman?!? UVing?!?

[Herra Tohtori]

... The Hattie does not use any 4096^2 textures.

If you happen to have high-res sources, though, it could still benefit from them in the Advanced MVP! I see some pixellation when I fly close to it!

[TrashMan]

Trashman?!? UVing?!?

Hey! I do it for all the fighters/bombars!

And pratially for some capships. But I never fully UV mapped a massive capship before..

[TrashMan]

... The Hattie does not use any 4096^2 textures.

If you happen to have high-res sources, though, it could still benefit from them in the Advanced MVP! I see some pixellation when I fly close to it!

And that's what worries me.
We're talkign about 5KM of ship here ... I'm conteplating the number qand size of textures carefully.. On one hand I want it to look good, on another, I don't want it to choke the game on slower machines.

[Nighteyes]

if you use your UV space well, even a 4.5km capship can look good with only 2 2048x2048 maps, and another 1024x1024 map for the smaller details, that worked out for me 
also don't forget the UV layout is the most important, you can always increase the size of the texture, but the UV needs to be good in the first place

[mjn.mixael]

You need to keep in mind something.. 3 separate maps may seem innocent enough. But once you add Shine, Glow, and Normal we will all of a sudden have 12 maps. Heck, I'm shooting for 2, maybe 3, for the Arcadia.

[Starman01]

Well, i have to admit I don't know much about  how the shine or other fancy maps are working ingame, but when I want to have as much detail (sharpness) on a modell by using as less textures as possible, I try to make the model as symetrical as possible. So every part that can be mirrored, can use up more texturespace and is therefore sharper textured than a complete object, that needs to be UV'ed in the entire texture file. But as I said, I don't know if that breaks shinemapping, like tilling is doing (that is being told to me).

Not to mention, it saves you quite some time UV-Mapping when you do that mirror part

[pecenipicek]

Well, i have to admit I don't know much about  how the shine or other fancy maps are working ingame, but when I want to have as much detail (sharpness) on a modell by using as less textures as possible, I try to make the model as symetrical as possible. So every part that can be mirrored, can use up more texturespace and is therefore sharper textured than a complete object, that needs to be UV'ed in the entire texture file. But as I said, I don't know if that breaks shinemapping, like tilling is doing (that is being told to me).

Not to mention, it saves you quite some time UV-Mapping when you do that mirror part

it can "break" normal mapping in some cases... hard to spot usually.

[DarthWang]

A big ship? Like, say, a Gargant? 

[Droid803]

That would require at 16384^2 map.

[Nuke]

id just resort to tiling on very large ships. a single 4096^2 or 4096*2048 makes an excellent corvette map. and for a very large ship, i would use tile textures, but the destroyer class would kind of be somewhere in between. 2 or 3 4096^2 would do, but you could save some memory by using a couple tiles with it. 4096^2 cost about 8 megs for a dxt1 and 16 megs for a dxt5. so if all map sizes are the same resolution were talking 8(or 16 if alpha is used)+8+16+16 megs for the entire set or 48 (56 with alpha) for the set. considering the amount of video memory on modern video cards, this is tiny, but i would aim for less than 100 megs of textures for any model. and greatly limit the number of ships that use that much texture space.

[bobbtmann]

I used one 2048x2048 and one 2048x1024 for my Dreadnought class heavy cruiser. It's about 600 m, and the maps turned out pretty good I found.

On a 3km ship I'd probably use three 2048x2048 textures. I don't think it's possible to scale up the texture at the same rate as the surface area of the ship.

[Zacam]

MV_Assets as a general rule will not exceed 2048x2048 (or 1024x2048/2048x1024), this is to make it as accessible as possible to all.
     (try to make it look as good as possible at this res, but don't stress too much if it is not as sharp as a block of cheddar)
MV_Advanced will do 4096x4096 because that is the usual maximum.
     (you want to make the previous as a down-scale of this, not make this as an upscale. I generally recommend doing initial mapping at this res, but distribute it as an optional extra after making the above baseline maps from this.)

Even though there are many folks who CAN do 8192x8192, that's not a frequent enough occurrence to be a new baseline.
And the count that can handle 16384x16384 can probably be counted on 1 hand, -maybe- two.