My very first post. Loved the Unity engine ever since I first realized it existed, which to be honest, isnt that long ago.
I know there isn’t any typical answer to this question since it’s varying depending on the project, but perhaps there is some kind of hidden formula out there? The question is as follows:
How do I know how many pixels per meter I need? Is that something you set in stone at the very beginning of the project? And what do you base it on, the looks or your experience, or is there as I previously said, some kind of formula to find out how many pixels one meter should include?
Maybe x amount of pixels in one Unity Unit (which if I am not wrong equals 1 centimeter)? I would love some thoughts and strategies on the subject.
And with that I bid you farewell for now.
Honestly, the size of a texture greatly varies depending on what its used for. A texture could be for a massive backdrop, but doesnt need to be that big because of its lack of a focus in the game. A texture could be incredibly small but appears often and needs to look good. Another texture could be very small but needs to be combined with another texture because you are optimizing for an iphone (as an example).
From general experience, although I’m sure lots of people will say differently, I’ve never gone above a 1024x1024 texture for the most important textures. I’ll drop as low as 128x128 for pretty inconsequential stuff. But it really all depends on what the textures are for. I don’t really think theres a solid formula to follow.
However, you should always keep textures in powers of 2 (128, 256, 512, 1024, etc).
The guys who did the bootcamp demo said that 1px per 1cm is a pretty good standard to use. Check out their presentation, http://unity3d.com/support/resources/unite-presentations/bootcamp-postmortem
One unit in Unity doesn’t equal anything in particular. Basically, it equals whatever you want it to equal.
(That said, one might consider 1 unit = 1 meter to be the default, if only because the default gravity setting is in m/s^2, assuming it’s intended to represent Earth-like gravity.)
1 pixel per cm is fine if your going for the playstation 1 look. i’m currently working at 10px per cm which looks comparative to games a couple of years old.
just remember a 3d character walking some 30 metres away isn’t made up of 10’000 + polys and a texture map of 2048 + resolution. it’s likely made up of 300 or 400 polys and at most 512 res. so it is possible to have great detail up close and have it drop off the further away. and remember that you have to do that, the unity engine doesn’t do it for you. it will use occlusion ( remove objects out of field of view ) but it won’t optimize your models. Maya has a really good editor for this purpose.
hope that helped some