NeilF wrote:In my defense though, exhibit (a) and (b):-
(a) uses less than 3meg
(b) uses nearly on 300meg
NeilF,
you discovered one important thing in your studies: There are
300 Meg textures that are done worse and
thus deliver
worse than other people's 3Meg ones!
On motherlode and elsewhere on the net you may find a lot
of crab (besides very good textures, of course)! So it's
important for everyone's 'learning curve' to concentrate on the
/signatures/ of what makes a good texture and what not.
This difference may seem trivial at first, but it really isn't.
For that reason, it's not a bad idea to be a little patient before
installing 500 Meg textures, notably /normal maps/.
Many texture 'creators' have never cared to learn even some
basics of image manipulation before submitting their first
texture. It is 'their learning experience' as you would probably
call it
One is always well advised to keep some names of people in
mind who really KNOW what they are doing at the texture
front!
Jestr or Don.Edwards for example are excellent
recommendations! I won't list the 'bad' guys now, but they are
known to some of us
. In collaboration with a most
talented texture wizzard, Mario/Spacegraphics.com, I did
extensive studies of 'extreme' hi-end texture optimization in
the past. The (free) textures (Mars!) on his site are among
the very best available.
Since the quality of the normal map is the decisive factor for
the crispyness and 3d impression of the display, the
importance of it being
smooth and of low-noise cannot
be over-emphasized. A hires normal map that you decide to
download, should by all means NOT be encoded as DXT1
format. DXT3 is a minimum quality requirement for /normal
maps/ in DXT format. The best bet for reasonably powerful
CPU+cards are PNG tiles, however! The quality difference to
any DXT encoding is immediately obvious, but DXTn is much
faster, of course....
The problem is that uploaders often don't even specify
whether they used DXT1 or DXT3 or even DXT5.
Unexperienced people like yourself then 'blindly' download
these 'monsters' and are badly disappointed about the
result...
An expert recognizes the answer immediately from the
/actual/ size of the texture compared to its nominal size (8k,
16k, 32k,...). The reason is the different inherent rates of
compression (8:1,4:1, 1:1,...)
I usually do the main texture in DXT1 (8:1) compression and
hardware decoding! That provides lots of SPEED reserve. But
for big size normal maps (>=16k), I always use PNG tiles.
...and so on....
Bye Fridger
PS: and by the way: as far as I can make out that dirt brown
Mars texture that you keep showing is a /flat/ one, NO
shading whatsover. Clearly that isn't fair to compare.
What you have to compare is a 'standard' 'statically' shaded
texture, corresponding to a /fixed/ location of the light source
(our Sun), to a /dynamically/ shaded one, where the shadows
change depending on the Sun's position! The latter is what
we all want and why we need normal maps or bump maps.
