[S-Unreal-004] Textures Standardization

In this article:

Overview

In the dynamic landscape of game development, where artists, programmers, game designers, producers, and more collaborate to craft captivating worlds, texture standardization plays a pivotal role in ensuring a seamless and optimized gaming experience. These standards define a set of guidelines for texture creation and usage, promoting uniform density, dimensions that are powers of 2, and other best practices. By adhering to consistent texture standards, development teams can enhance performance, minimize memory overhead, and expedite rendering processes. Moreover, these standards provide a common language for creators, fostering cohesive visual aesthetics and the efficient sharing of assets. In the ever-evolving universe of game development, texture standardization serves as the cornerstone for producing visually stunning and efficiently performing games, offering both players and creators an enhanced and immersive gaming journey.

Scope

This standardization cover the Unreal Style Guideline about how to work in Unreal. This standard applies to all person in in team that work using Unreal Engine.

Technical Director and Art Director was the parties whose in charge in these guidelines. While all of the team member should follow these guidelines, they can ask about the guidelines to the directors or can propose some new guidelines here and there.

Textures Standardization

This section will focus on Texture assets and their internals.

[S-Unreal-004.1] Dimensions Are Powers of 2

All textures, except for UI textures, must have its dimensions in multiples of powers of 2. Textures do not have to be square.

For example, 128x512, 1024x1024, 2048x1024, 1024x2048, 1x512.

[S-Unreal-004.2] Texture Density Should Be Uniform

All textures should be of a size appropriate for their standard use case. Appropriate texture density varies from project to project, but all textures within that project should have a consistent density.

For example, if a project's texture density is 8 pixel per 1 unit, a texture that is meant to be applied to a 100x100 unit cube should be 1024x1024, as that is the closest power of 2 that matches the project's texture density.

[S-Unreal-004.3] Textures Should Be No Bigger than 8192

No texture should have a dimension that exceeds 8192 in size, unless you have a very explicit reason to do so. Often, using a texture this big is simply just a waste of resources.

It’s also recommended that texture don’t exceeds 2048 in size although we were targeting 4K display as we can achieve it using work-around solution like anti-alias and anisotropic bilinear/trilinear.

[S-Unreal-004.4] Textures Should Be Grouped Correctly

Every texture has a Texture Group property used for LOD-ing, and this should be set correctly based on its use. For example, all UI textures should belong in the UI texture group.

This also impacting in how to name the asset, for example UI and ColorLookUpTable group don’t require suffix while the others have.