ideal game texture sizes

[Kojack]

Do it like the developers of Chronicles Of Riddick and release a high res remake of your game several years later. Now you get more sales by having a new release, and some previous owners may buy the upgraded one too.

[jjp]

So with art, why wouldn't you model in high mesh and texture res? The thing with art is it isn't much more work. It's not like it's 32x32 pixel art. The work comes in when reducing the mesh to the needed res. But if you just don't bother until the last minute it's the same amount of work (since everything is zbrushed now anyway). Just do a hack mesh reduction job for development and later retopologise them properly. Who knows, in 2 years some tool might come out that does a perfect job of reducing them anyway.

Artists who work efficiently do not sculpt things that will not be visible in the final version of the object. Thinking of more details and sculpting/painting them is more work. And bear in mind that art is the main thing that has been driving up development costs over the last years. It is exactly not the place where you want to spend more work than necessary.

[Vectrex]

So with art, why wouldn't you model in high mesh and texture res? The thing with art is it isn't much more work. It's not like it's 32x32 pixel art. The work comes in when reducing the mesh to the needed res. But if you just don't bother until the last minute it's the same amount of work (since everything is zbrushed now anyway). Just do a hack mesh reduction job for development and later retopologise them properly. Who knows, in 2 years some tool might come out that does a perfect job of reducing them anyway.

Artists who work efficiently do not sculpt things that will not be visible in the final version of the object. Thinking of more details and sculpting/painting them is more work. And bear in mind that art is the main thing that has been driving up development costs over the last years. It is exactly not the place where you want to spend more work than necessary.

I'm not saying to add more details that won't be seen. Unfortunately artist tools are pretty crappy, so you can't really model in hires and skin it expecting to later on reduce the polys etc.

[jjp]

Unfortunately artist tools are pretty crappy, so you can't really model in hires and skin it expecting to later on reduce the polys etc.

With ZBrush or Mudbox you can (of course most of the time reducing mesh complexity has to be done manually) and do sculpt and paint a high resolution model and then produce your low/mid poly art from it. I would not call these tools crappy

[wacom]

I'd rather mention TopoGun than ZBrush or Mudbox in this regard.

[Vectrex]

Unfortunately artist tools are pretty crappy, so you can't really model in hires and skin it expecting to later on reduce the polys etc.

With ZBrush or Mudbox you can (of course most of the time reducing mesh complexity has to be done manually) and do sculpt and paint a high resolution model and then produce your low/mid poly art from it. I would not call these tools crappy

I mostly mean reducing the polygons on a fully skinned, rigged and animated mesh.

[jjp]

I mostly mean reducing the polygons on a fully skinned, rigged and animated mesh.

Point taken. Doing a character rig and animation still is a point of no return. But we're originally talking about textures here, aren't we? And poly counts are not that much of an issue in any case. The problem of having to re-do rigging and animation for a character because the number of polygons has to be increased/reduced should occur rarely.