Texture file size

[Gaieus]

Hi all,

I am wondering how good resolution should an image texture be to render nicely. Yes, I know that from a distance, it doesn't matter and if I go real close, it does matter but like in architectural visualization - generally speaking, when say you are looking at a building from a "reasonable distance".

More "numerically", when creating textures, something like 1 millimetre to a pixel should be fine I guess. This would mean that the span of 1 metre of a wall would be covered by 1000 pixels which should be enough. Am I right in this?

[Ecuadorian]

Textures should have more resolution than the one they'll have in the final render, so they are never upscaled.
So, if, say, your texture will occupy about 300 x 300 pixels in your rendered image, the texture file should have more than that; 480x480 would be OK. You have to consider tiling, of course. If you have a textured wall that will take up 1000 pixels wide in your final image, but the texture will repeat four times in this width, each individual instance of the texture will be 250px wide, you should be fine with a texture file with a width of 320 pixels. By the same reasoning, it's pointless to use textures with more resolution than your final render, unless they're going to cover big areas and you'll only be focusing on a portion of it, as is the case with spherical skies.

Now, you should only worry about this with high contrast or high detail textures; textures with soft gradients usually upscale well. In all cases, be sure to save your textures as maximum quality JPGs.

[Gaieus]

Thanks Miguel,

I guess that if I render a building, with my example, a one-metre section of the wall won't cover 1000 pixels in the final render so I shouldn't really worry about this then.

The source vs. output relation indeed sounds reasonable.