4K textures are USELESS!

In this video we take a look at how textures are optimized inside game engines, what MIP Maps are and, most importantly, how we can customize them.

Even though I bring the example of DDS files and Unreal Engine, this tech is used in every real time engine and videogame.

The texture I show in this video is extremely useful for every environment and character artist who wants to be sure the content they create is performant.

[cedric]

Roughness on human skin requires custom mipmaps too.
From close, the human skin is fairly smooth but if you keep a low roughness at a distance, the skin will appear glossy.
You can solve it in shaders (at a cost of extra instructions), or for free in mipmaps by increasing the roughness value in lower mips.

[Mireneye]

This reminds me ever so slightly of the method they used in Ghost of Tsushima to analyze a scene for how grainy it's normals and albedos are, so they could homogenize some of the visual look and make it less noisy and easier on the eyes.

Very cool trick! I typically eyeball after what I think is important objects and things I want to keep as focal points and if I end up with too many props getting downgraded I sometimes stop and re-evaluate if I have to create some specific shader variant that use less textures samples and share more of them. So the cost comes out at least the same. Preferably cheaper.

[TorQueMoD]

I was thinking about how useless 4K textures are the other day, especially in a PBR workflow. You pretty much never need an albedo higher than 1k. I think 1K for albedo, 2k for RMAO and 2k for normals, with an occasional exception for a 4K normal map on a hero asset is all you ever need. And my God, would artists please stop making meshes with 10+ textures! So unoptimized.

[neo-giu]

Best use I've seen for custom mipmaps is the water in super mario sunshine, very creative usage

[jeggie]

This video is very informative about how to use and manipulate mipmaps in Unreal, however I'm confused about the utility of the texture you created. How does using the material you provided differ from simply using the Required Texture Resolution view mode?

[MaxPuliero]

why do you want to make the mipmaps manually? and why don't use just virtual texture that perform already very good on current a hardware?

[wpwscience]

Ok, ideas requested: use one of your mips that you aren't using for channel packing crap you don't have an easy way to bring in without an extra texture sample. Then be like skip this mip for doing stuff but grab this mip for your opacity mask or metallic or ao or whatever map you didn't have room for.

[toapyandfriends]

Can you automate this whole process like mipmap creation automatically for any texture like really go through and see how much of this you can automate make it closer to unreal engine... nanite but for textures

[YuuJer]

never knew how to make these! so cool! I saw a youtube video where they broke down the snowflakes in one of the mario games, where the closer the particle, the more snowflake shaped it looked. and smaller mips were round masks

[Tylru]

Also, I'm wondering - The packed Mipmaps texture (being double width minus 1px), all of that empty space... I wonder if there is a way to make use of that texture space? Is it possible to sample the packed mipmap texture including it's excess space? I doubt there is, but it feels like a good opportunity to experiment with channel packing/masks. Even without the excess space, could you potentially force the material to discard the first mip level, and use that as a separate three-channel mask?

Just thinking, something like...

0 = 4k albedo
1 = 2k Rough/Metallic/AO
2+ = 1k or less albedo mips

Or if the albedo wasn't that important, you could potentially put the masks in the 4k / highest mip level, and reassemble srgb in the material for the 2k mip level albedo

[Tylru]

Just wondering - You show the Mip Bias, but does "Maximum Texture Size" (I forget the exact name) also scrap the higher resolution mips when building? We've been using this to set a maximum size lower than the imported texture size, but now I'm wondering if it's actually a good thing to do?

[ethanwasme]

when you say "scrap", will 4k textures when compiled to a 1k texture save on disk data, or would you still wanna replace the 4k with 1k towards the end of production?

[josephfrye]

hmm well that's odd the texture is in highest quality already but i think it's the monitour or projector 4k quality no matter which circuit or components are.

[thegreendude]

You could do some very trippy stuff with this.
Oh what's this in the distance? An apple tree? Wrong! It's a meat sculpture!

[analogsamurai]

You have a 980ti? The constraints you are working on are good actually, you remember that things should run on lower end systems and there are illusionary ways to pull it off that many devs forget

[Punisher]

i use 256 usually.... for big bosses 512 thats all, i think i dont need that, but its still awesome for non ps2 projects xD

[IstyManame]

does it work for TSR and other upscalers? i saw it changes value when you change resolution but TSR looks pretty much as 100% at 80%

[slizzy]

I keep saying that all the time 1K and 2K are more than sufficient. 4K textures will only hinder the systems with little to no gains in visual quality

[locklear]

I'm sorry but there is no reason not to use 4k textures if not higher ones. Honestly, we need to stop using resolution and use PPI/DPI with 400 being the goal.

[ACABROCKY]

So basicly this won't work for AMD users? :(