Max texture size for a dds to be used in LE?

[njord]

Hello all guys.

 

We created a flat rectangular plane for our airport model in 3Dsmax.

 

However airport is too large. So to have detailed textures on the floor, we divided the plane into tiles and textured them seperately. (textures are with mip maps, to avoid texture aliasing)

 

While tessellating the terrain, we tried applying different resolutions of textures including 2048x2048, 4096x4096 and 8192x8192 sizes on tiles.

 

If we shrink the texture size, we need to also shrink that tile's size since we do not want to lose detail.

 

 

8192x8192 textures caused some problems with LE editor including access violations. Is what we are trying reasonable ?

 

What is the highest texture size you would recommend us to use in LE ?

 

Please note that a 4096 texture takes up to 22 mb, and we will have at least 50 tiles. If the texture sizes are gonna shrink, tile number will quadruple.

 

Lets say gpu ram is 1GB, texture memory of it is even smaller. What would you recommend us to do ? More tiles, smaller textures OR Less tiles, larger textures ?

 

Also, would you recommend using a single gmf for a large terrain plane with many textures on it , or would you recommend seperate gmf's for each tile ?

 

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

PS : You would say, why make very large textures on the terrain ? Repeat (tile) a texture ! Well we cannot do that unfortunately, because there are unique (colored) line patterns scattered on the airport. Textures can only be repeated where there is pure grass or concrete i guess right ?

[Rick]

You could make a plane that hugs the terrain and put whatever you want for textures on it to get your effect.

[njord]

Rick basically you say that our way of modelling is correct then ? Because another method is to model the terrain plane with small but repeating textures of concrete and grass, then put the lines as seperate geometry on the terrain which was our previous method (the texture sizes were not gigantic in this way). But we had severe aliasing problems when looking at line polygons horizontally. So we changed our method to the one I explained above.

 

What do you think of ideal texture sizes ? Is it ok to use 50-150 4096x4096 textures which occupies a great deal of memory ? Is it feasible ?

[katron3]

Hello Josh,

 

 

As you can see in the attached screen shots, the airport is divided in 128x128 meters tiles. I applied on them a texture with 8192x8192 pixels, in order to have a good visual quality during simulations .

That is not the entire airport, just 15%. But the LW editor crashed . So, we must use lower resolutions for the textures (4096 or even 2048). That's means 64x64 meters or 32x32 meters tiles . The smaller the tiles, the more work is required .

 

What do you think? Can we use textures with 4096x4096 pixels ? Or should we use lower resolutions ? and more work involved )

 

Regards,

Florin

 

 

 

 

quote name='njord' timestamp='1321453908' post='36708']

Hello all guys.

 

We created a flat rectangular plane for our airport model in 3Dsmax.

 

However airport is too large. So to have detailed textures on the floor, we divided the plane into tiles and textured them seperately. (textures are with mip maps, to avoid texture aliasing)

 

While tessellating the terrain, we tried applying different resolutions of textures including 2048x2048, 4096x4096 and 8192x8192 sizes on tiles.

 

If we shrink the texture size, we need to also shrink that tile's size since we do not want to lose detail.

 

 

8192x8192 textures caused some problems with LE editor including access violations. Is what we are trying reasonable ?

 

What is the highest texture size you would recommend us to use in LE ?

 

Please note that a 4096 texture takes up to 22 mb, and we will have at least 50 tiles. If the texture sizes are gonna shrink, tile number will quadruple.

 

Lets say gpu ram is 1GB, texture memory of it is even smaller. What would you recommend us to do ? More tiles, smaller textures OR Less tiles, larger textures ?

 

Also, would you recommend using a single gmf for a large terrain plane with many textures on it , or would you recommend seperate gmf's for each tile ?

 

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

PS : You would say, why make very large textures on the terrain ? Repeat (tile) a texture ! Well we cannot do that unfortunately, because there are unique (colored) line patterns scattered on the airport. Textures can only be repeated where there is pure grass or concrete i guess right ?

[Rick]

But we had severe aliasing problems when looking at line polygons horizontally. So we changed our method to the one I explained above.

 

How did you specifically go about aligning the plane with the terrain? Manual alignment? Some time ago I took a plane put a texture on it, and then via code aligned it's vertices to that of the terrain directly under it, with possibly having the y value be +.01 to avoid clipping into the terrain but being pretty much as close as possible to the terrain. The plane I did followed my mouse so it was doing that real-time and it worked out really well. The more verts you have in the plane the better it'll look when your terrain has some undulation.

 

You could make your plane terrain in a modelling program and texture it so it looks exactly the way you want it, just with more verts in it than you normally would as you'll be manipulating their positions in code to hug the terrain. Then in lua you can run the code 1 time to align it to the terrain. You can now put it anywhere and it should look just fine.

 

I can't get the link to my video that shows this where I am, but if you search youtube for rpiller1 UNtitled 27.avi it should bring it up. The big light blue circle about 1/2 way into the video shows the plane that is being aligned in real-time to the terrain as it follows the mouse and as you can see it goes over some decent sized hills and still looks good. How good it'll look is dependent on how many verts you have.

 

I feel like this will just give you more freedom to place this anywhere you want over any kind of hills. You just have to get the code in the model's lua file.

[Josh]

It just depends on the hardware. There is no engine limitation.

[katron3]

Thank you

 

Florin