Limits when building environments?

[Smi7h1sH3r3 808]

In a general sense, how many tris should I be sticking to when building environments for games. The same goes for textures; I'd like to use 512's but I'm not sure how much texture memory I should take up.

I suppose it'd depend on what systems I'd be making it for as well so I suppose I'm asking for a happy in-between.

Though it'd be great if I don't have to worry bout it and just go for it but in a slightly reserved sorta way lol.

[rburke]

this all of course depends on your target media, and the size and style of your environment. Sometimes the environment will take very well to tiling textures cutting down on the total number of maps you need. But other times you need to have many more unique textures and in turn may need to use smaller textures to stay within your budget. My last environments project had a pretty large budget. We had 3 1024 maps just for main brick textures. Then we had a list of about 25 other textures we could use for the building. Not to mention each of these textures could have a normal and spec map of the same size. So there was a ton of textures to use. We also had 5k tris per building. Take a look at the AAU games environments class listed in the homework is the budget for 2 diff buildings that needed to be built to next gen standards. If your still at the earlier stages of your education, and are going to be learning previous gen stuff first then your going to have a very small budget of 512 maps and smaller and knowing how to tile properly is going to be very important.

Something to keep in mind is that 1 512 map = 4 256 maps or 16 128 maps. Just like a 1024 texture is 4 512 maps 16 256 maps and 64 128 maps.

[Smi7h1sH3r3 808]

sweet that's exactly what I was lookin for

xp has been gained

thanx

[Amad]

A good practice to use is to build textures a level higher than you anticipate... that is to say, do a 1024 instead of a 512. If the budget needs it, you can always reduce the size to fit the budget and do some minor tweaks to get the smaller details to read. Sharpening slightly in PS is a really good way to clean up after reducing texture sizes for tight details.