Texture development

[Parmenides]

Does anyone in the industry know how big textures are before they are put into the game as the artist hands them off? Specifically, I'm wondering if all textures start out with a very high resolution and then reduced to fit into consoles and possibly even reduced for the PC.

I always wonder when games add higher res textures later. If they didn't start high res, did the artists only make low res ones before they went back and made the better ones? Maybe they start by sending out rough drafts first?

Just curious of the process.

 

[Laffles]

Always made larger and scaled down, as a designer I am 99% sure this is just how it's done, I'm not a games designer but working in print or web the logic would pretty much stay the same I would imagine. There is never an issue if you make something too large, it can always be scaled down, the other way around however = issues

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Usually it's a design decision to either focus on consoles and port to PC or vice versa, if there is an intended PC release and they want to focus on higher standards the source art will be higher resolution for the PC and scaled down for the consoles.

The overwhelming number of games don't support higher resolution textures for the PC, they don't need to, gamers keep buying PC games regardless of the lack of quality.

 

[Roliath]

The overwhelming number of games don't support higher resolution textures for the PC, they don't need to, gamers keep buying PC games regardless of the lack of quality.

lets not start this flame war, as it has nothing to do with what the op was asking.

 

[schenks]

For my own work, we generally create at the intended final resolution (Eg: if the final is gonna be 1024x, then it's done at that resolution). Scaling tends to introduce weird artifacty things, and in many cases, it doesn't make sense to start something super high resolution, then scale it down, when in many cases you can just work at the resolution it's intended to be, and know what it will look like straight out in the best case. Since you're going to be dealing with some automatic scaling anyway with mipmaps, it's better to minimize how many times you're going to scale your textures as you get your work done.

Edit: I should add, in some cases we do start higher than intended, but reducing resolution tends to be a matter of reducing our memory footprint more than anything else. Typically we know beforehand what our memory footprint is and what our asset set will be, so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to spend a ton of time on a high res texture for something that will be low detail in the end.