What is Texel Density and How to Master it 

That's great I'm glad you found this useful, thanks for commenting. Texel density is an advanced concept, but at this stage most schools should be teaching it in my opinion. For games work you generally need to know it before applying.

Yep you got, I'm terrible at math my wife also explained it to me after I finished the video.

True same as 2048 / 100 Pixels per Centimeter = 20.48

Really great point considering centimeter as maya’’s default unit of measurement!

Hello! Sorry I am confused! I understood that you divided it by 100 because 1 meter = 100cm. But why did you divide 2048 by 4? Where did you get the "4"?

thank you dude, you honestly helped more than the video :')

Thanks for that motivational feedback, much appreciated.

Right on, glad that helped. Thanks for leaving a comment.

I'm glad you enjoyed the video, thanks for commenting and letting me know.

Hey ZombieDawgie

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.

Clinton is the man, we used to work together. Thanks for that feedback, stay tuned for more videos.

Great, glad you found what you needed, thanks for watching.

Thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying the tools and found this video useful.

That's awesome, thanks for that motivational feedback. Glad you found the video useful.

That's great, thanks for taking the time to leave this positive comment.

malcolm341 you are a great teacher keep up the good work and good luck.

Thanks a lot for this feedback. I have a plan to do a tutorial on packing and how much to space out your UVs shells coming in the future sometime. This video was getting really long so I had to save packing for another time.

Thanks for your nice comment, in the future I'll try to do a project based tutorial.

Glad you found it useful, thanks for commenting.

Right on! Took quite some time to figure out how to explain this without being totally confusing.

Thanks a lot for leaving that nice comment.

I'm glad you found it useful, thanks for commenting.

That's great I'm glad you're finding this channel useful.

Thanks for your feedback, glad you enjoyed the video.

Hey you're welcome, thanks for commenting.

Glad you're enjoying the tutorial.

Oh nice, thanks for watching my content and purchasing my tools pack.

@@malcolm341 Not a problem chap. Classic Maya and a million ways to do one thing. It always amazes me that people such as yourself create such great tools and ways to streamline the software and Autodesk continue to just pile more plugins and crap on top rather than focussing on the everyday simple stuff. (I think a tonne of blender artists just rolled their collective eyes.)

@@bobvelocity Yeah there's something to be said for UI that just has the tools you want in it, whereas with Autodesk they have to put everything into the UI, but you might only use some of those tools once a year. Blender looks cool, I haven't tried yet, I'm having too much fun learning Mel scripting in Maya.

Thanks for that very nice comment, glad you enjoyed the tutorial.

Thanks! I appreciate your comment about appreciating me.

@@malcolm341 lol ;)

Thanks a lot, glad you enjoyed it.

Thanks, I'm glad you found the video useful. Thanks for leaving a comment.

@@malcolm341 =)

Thanks for commenting, glad you enjoyed the video. If you're using Max the same principles apply, but Max defaults to meters where Maya is centimeters. So to follow along with this video you can use 2048 per 4m in Max would be the same as what I showed in Maya. Another Max artist contacted me at one point and he found this Max script useful for setting texel density www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/texel-density-tool

@@malcolm341 Thanks, I'll check it out. I am just getting back into 3d modelling after 8+ years of not touching it. Videos like this help me catch up to today's standards much faster. This was the first video of yours I have seen, will be checking out the rest of your channel this week.

Great, thanks.

Great, thanks for the feedback.

Right on, thanks for taking the time to leave a positive comment.

Thank you!

Thanks for leaving a comment, glad you found it useful. Enjoy the script.

Awesome, that's great. Good luck.

That's awesome, thanks a lot for your purchase and supporting me. Enjoy the scripts, more to come.

@@malcolm341 Just an update on this as my feeling has changed slightly. Pretty much saved my uni year and helped me commit to becoming an environmental artist instead of level designer! That just because I feel I can enjoy maya more freely and blitz through problems so much more efficiently. More and more of my class have gotten it over the past few months and very similar feelings of joy. Installing updates was a worry for me and reinstalling it all. But it is so ridiculously easy and hassle-free. I am giving you credit when I graduate haha

@@matthewrimington6335 Awesome, thanks for letting me know, nice to hear you and your class mates are enjoying the tools. More to come.

Yeah multi-texturing is the future in my opinion instead of using 8k or 16k textures. We've be doing multi-texturing for rocks for while now because they're so big and need to be scaled to different sizes. The reason we haven't seen Paragon style texturing adopted in mainstream games is because the instruction count is too high, we investigated live tiling textures for Gears 5 and it was too expensive, tri-planar projections alone are too high instruction count be useful, and live tileable layers even without the tri-planar are also unreasonably expensive. Live layers also present another technical limitation in that creating the RGB masks is an annoying cumbersome workflow because of channel packing and limiting the number of layers per material to 3 or 4, or even 8 makes for simplistic synthetic looking textures. On Gears 5 we did the whole RGB mask thing and all textures were created from a source pool of tiling swatches, but that data was baked in engine so the game would actually run. You need at least 15 to 25 layers to make realistic looking material. On these new consoles I don't think you're going to see too much change in the way things are textured unless the Unreal 5 Nanite thing proves to be usable, I have a feeling that you'll mostly see that used for terrain and rocks though.

Thanks a lot for your comment, glad you enjoyed the video.

Thanks for letting me know, more videos to come.

Thank you, have a great day.

Yes you are correct, the pix per unit measurement is the more common way of measuring texel density these days so 5.12 pixels per 1 unit of measurement is more common than saying 2048 = 400.

Oh great, I'm glad you enjoyed the video. In Max the main difference is that the default working unit is meters where Maya is centimeters so in Max this video I made would be 2048pix across 4 units in Max, and 400 units in Maya. I recommend this script if you're using Max it appears to work the same as the Maya default tool www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/texel-density-tool and this other toolbox looks like you can do it here too renderhjs.net/textools/3dsMax.html

Actually, I changed the working units in max to centimeters and did the 400 cm sq plane and used your checker to still work through your tutorial. As I mentioned, I did find the texel density script you mentioned but it does not quite work like Maya but I figured it out. There is no good direction on how to use this script so I am glad I saw you use the Maya one to give me some direction. Again, well done video.

@@arcitek66 Oh okay, well I'm glad you were able to figure it with this video and the Max script.

I'm glad you found this useful, thanks for letting me know. If you want to learn more check out this person's in depth tutorial ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QcqJckp_q3M.html

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed the video. If you'd like to learn more there is a comprehensive tutorial by another person with real world examples. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QcqJckp_q3M.html

You're welcome, thanks for leaving a comment.

Fantastic, thanks for letting me know you found the video useful.

​@@malcolm341 No problem. This past month I've been pulling mine and my artist's hair out about texel density, sizes, etc. I was doing it completely wrong and using texels as finite, due to how small some of the UV's or large the UV's got on objects. (Realizing much later why you should stack, butterfly, and many other ways of shrinking the shell is the correct way of tackling the issue.) I do have a few questions though. After resizing to the correct texel density using the 400 units example, a lot of our assets are not really taking advantage of the UV space. Out of the full UV space, most are around u0.2 v0.2, as they are mostly interior objects like chairs, stools, tables, etc. Would it be more beneficial to add multiple assets to the texture, even though we have them as separate meshes?

@@charlescortes873 technically speaking filling in wasted UV space is always better, but practically this is lot of work and generally not worth it. I would probably scale up smaller details to fill up the wasted space, or use rectangular textures as often that allow UV layout to fill the space when I square UV layout is wasteful. Also you can deliberately cut the UV shells and separate them to fill up space, but that will create more seams you need to texture over later. Each object will be different and reducing seams while also using all the UV space can take a lot of time.

Thanks for your comment, glad you enjoyed the video and thanks for leaving the additional link for other to learn from.

Thanks for your feedback.

Would be nice if you can share how to go about texel density on Characters, specially how to stack the uvs, I know that is almost the same thing, but characters are more complex to stack and would be nice to know any tips and tricks kind of thing.

You're welcome, thanks for commenting.

Thanks, yes it's actually that simple you can copy paste the value from the plane, this is how I often do it when I don't want to do the math.

You're welcome, thanks for commenting.

@@malcolm341 now do a blender version ;)

@@DeclanMakesStuff If you want to do texel density in Blender you can purchase this it will allow you to follow this tutorial and achieve the same results. blendermarket.com/products/texel-density-checker

You're welcome, thanks for commenting.

Hey you're welcome, thanks for leaving a comment.

That's a great idea, I'll add it to the least.

Yeah 200cm would look quite nice. I've never worked on a first person game, just third person action games. On the last game I worked on we used 384cm = 2048 pixels and then we still had to use detail maps so when you got close to something or aimed down sights things would still look good. Somewhere in the 200cm to 300cm seems like a good place, but you'll need to balance that against texture repeats since 200cm is not a very large surface, so you may need to employ other techniques like detail maps and or vertex blending to break up the surfaces to hide the repeats. Ideally you have a small test scene with the POV hooked up and you just walk around a bit and put some test textures on the floor and walls and see what looks good.

You're welcome.

Great description, thanks.

You're welcome, thanks for leaving a comment.

Neat trick thanks for sharing, the downside to this method is it's a bit slow to computer and the shells don't scale from their centers.

That's great stephen, I'm glad you enjoyed the video. Texel density is relative so you can technically use whatever you want, for example on games I've worked on we usually use 400cm = 2048 pixels, on Dead Rising 3 I believe they used 512cm = 2048 pixels, this would give more unique pixels without seeing a repeat on the tiling ground, but the pixels would also be lower rez and softer so moving the camera close to the texture would break down faster. I've even heard of some games using 200cm = 2048 pixels, so that would mean lots of repeated details on the tiling ground, but very high res and you could move the camera very close without loss of detail or blurriness. It's up to you to determine which texel density suits your project and then try to maintain consistency from there. That's why I always figure out the floor texture first and make sure everything matches to that. In the texel density tool inside the transform rollout of the UV editor all you need to do is select a single face and click the get button, this will automatically give you the magic number you're looking for. Providing you've mapped your first reference object correctly to the desired density you like. I wouldn't recommend changing the units in Maya to meters I've found in the past this causes issues, instead I'd leave Maya in centimeters and just make something 100cm when you want to make 1meter.

Thank you Malcolm. This recording was very useful because it was not just about the tools but about the process and so many recordings don't do that. Thank you very much

Thanks, I'll try to include the how, and also the why in all future videos. That's good feedback.

Apologies for going on about this but my whole workflow has changed because of this video and the quality of the work is much much higher. Really thank you very much. Apologies again for another message.

@ShmodoBagins Thanks I'm glad you found this video useful. I highly recommend this other video if you're interested in texel density on Dylan's channel. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QcqJckp_q3M.html With a trim sheet the texel density is defined the same way as starting with a quad. So if you have a quad 400cm x 400cm whatever texture size you map to that in 0-1 UV space becomes the current texel density, so in my case I put a 2048x2048 on it so texel density becomes 2048 pixels per 400cm or 1 pixel per 5.12cm if you prefer. With a trim sheet it's the same 400cm quad, but your texture is in strips cut up horizontally and you only tile the UVs horizontally on your final model so the texel density is locked in the same way as a regular tiling texture, but you need to make a bunch of different strips to account for the heights in centimeters of your model that you want to use the trim sheet on. Typically what you want to do is build the model first and then identify which parts can use trim sheets and create the texture strips in your trim sheet to match exactly or very closely to the vertical height of your geometry that you will apply the trim sheet texture to. I think an easy way to get started would be make quad and assign a 2048x2048 texture to it, or whatever base texel density you use, then from there cut it up into horizontal strips with the cut polygon tool of how many trims you want, somewhere between 4 to 16 faces after cutting. Then use those faces to extrude your geometry from and you would have a perfect 1:1 texel density with your trims providing you don't change the height during extrusion. In practice there's more flexibility and people will create 12 trims in one texture lets say, and then stretch those a bit up or down to fit parts of the model instead of having everything be exactly perfect.

@@malcolm341 Thank you so much for getting back to me and giving such a detailed explanation, I appreciate it so much. I didn't expect one on a 5yr old vid haha. But this really does help me get my mind around it a bit better. I think also with playing around I should hopefully learn a few things, make a few mistakes. I will definitely have a look at the video you linked as well. I attempted my first trimsheet yesterday and in theory it looks good but we will see how it comes out when I test it lol.

@@ShmodoBagins Good luck, I'm sure you'll figure it out after trying it a couple times. When in doubt, just apply a checker texture to your trim sheet and confirm it's the same size as the rest of the checkers in your scene on non-trim sheet assets.

I'm not sure I fully understand the question. There are two kinds of decals in the games industry, deferred decal and mesh decal. Mesh decal is a floating poly you model on your mesh, deferred decal is a projector that planar maps the decal on top of your geometry in the game engine, they both have their uses and limitations. In Substance painter you get a deferred decal that gets baked into the exported texture. Everything that comes out of the Substance export will be a flat 2k or 4k map and your decal will just be part of that so it will automatically be the same texel density as whatever UVs you've done before bringing it into Painter. Unless, you use a really small texture as a decal in Painter and then scale the decal projector up larger than what the number of pixels will be in the final exported texture. If you really want to understand what Painter is doing, apply a 2k checker inside of Painter as a base layer and note how big the checkers are in the 3D view. Now create decal box or whatever it's called in Painter and apply the same checker texture to it, if you scale the decal projector down and the decal checkers are smaller than the base layer checker applied to mesh everything is fine, if you scale the projector up and the decal checkers get bigger than the base layer checkers you've lost resolution and the decal will appear soft looking in the final texture which should be avoided, but may not be that noticeable depending on what the final decal will actually be. Stains might look fine scaled up to some degree, text or normal maps may be soft and pixelated.

In Max it's the same depending on how big you build things, it's all relative to the character. For example, a person is roughly 2 meters tall rounding up so that would be 200cm in Maya for the base scale, then you can use 400cm = 2048 pixels as a good starting place for the ground and walls. I believe in Max it defaults to meters so that would mean you can make your character 2 meters in Max, then you can use 4 meters = 2048 pixels as a good starting place for texel density on ground and walls. You can go higher if that's still too blurry, but I wouldn't personally go lower. For Gears 5 we used 384cm = 2048 pixels, and in max that would be 3.84m = 2048 pixels so we went a bit higher rez for that game, but I prefer to work in a power of 10 so things line up easier, 384cm is a wacky scale to build modular kits on in my opinion.

Yes exactly, I was taught this technique while working on Need For Speed back in 2008, NFS is a third person game and a one story building is roughly 4 meters tall in real life so 400 units = average resolution of texture worked well on that game and pretty much all others I've worked on since then. At the time we were on xbox360 so 400 units = 512 pixels and the nice thing is as hardware advanced we kept 400 units = ??? and just upped the average resolution of the texture. We're currently at 400 units = 2048 pixels, but in the future I'm sure we'll get to 400 units = 4096 pixels.

@@malcolm341 What should u aim for? And what is the relationship for pixels, I don't understand, like, is 5.12 the same as 512 pixels per unit?

I personally aim for 400cm in Maya = 2048 pixels. That would be 5.12 pixels per centimeter I think. Make a plane in Maya 400cm big which is mapped 0-1, then apply 2048 texture to it, divide 2048 texture (pixels) by 400cm = which gives you 5.12 pixels per centimeter. I don't usually do the math though that's too confusing, I just make my plane the size I want, map it 0-1 and apply a 2048 texture, from there you can click the get texel density button in the default Maya tool which should capture 5.12 pixels per centimeter. Change the size of your plane if you prefer more or less pixels per square meter and click get texel density again.

@@malcolm341 Can u get a 2048 or 1024 texture from checker mapping?

Not too sure what you mean by that?

Thanks, glad you enjoyed the video. I just use the default grid settings, I generally hide the UV grid when I'm working. To increase the size of the grid in the UV editor, inside the UV editor file menu go to View> Grid options box> change Length and Width: to whatever you like, I think 10 tiles is the default, so if you increase it from there and hit apply that will make the grid bigger.

Thanks for the answer and sure one can resize the grid which is straightforward but what i was curious about was if the resizing the grid would make sense in practice to fit larger shells in the UV space. thanks again.

Good question, cutting UV edges means each additional cut adds to the vert count in game engine, so the more UV cuts you do the more verts your final model will have. That said, I don't really think about it, I generally try to unwrap my meshes with as few cuts as possible because it makes texturing easier. In Maya 2022 they have a game vertex counter now so you can see how many extra verts are added as you apply UV mapping which is handy.

I generally work in cintemeters and the grid is set to Length/Width 128 Gridlines every 32 Subdivisions 1

It's the same workflow no mater what game style you work on, first define the camera distance from your average ground texture, then determine what your average texture is going to be, let's say 2048x2048 will be your average texture. So while looking through the game camera apply the texture to the ground and scale the UVs as few times as possible. If it starts to look too blurry scale the UVs a bit more until you find the sweet spot. Once you've found that select the ground plane and use the get texel density button to record what that texel density is. Round up or down if it's a lot of decimal places. From there apply that texel density to the props and see how it looks, if you think it's too high and your props are too pixel dense you can scale the textures down in engine by half which is what I recommend because it's non-destructive.

The easiest way to think about it is make a plane that's 1x1cm, then apply your desired average texture too it in your case 1024x1024. Now scale the plane up until you think it looks too blurry, than look at how big the plane is and that will give you 1024 pixels across some number of centimeters. I use 400cm = 2048 pixels because it's a good spot for third person action games, but on the last game I worked on we used 384cm = 2048 pixels, so a bit higher rez. This is of course all relative to how close the camera gets on average. If you wanted to use 1024x1024 texture, but still want the same average texel density as 400cm = 2048 pixels you just need to tile the texture twice across the 400cm plane. Or, make a plane that's 200cm and apply the 1024 texture, that would be the same as making a 400cm plane and applying a 2048 texture. That would give the same number of pixels per cm, but you'd see more repeating since the texture is half as big. It's basically a trade off between repeating patterns and blurry pixels and you need to determine what you like for your particular project and then just stick to it so everything is very close. Typically people will use the ground as a starting point and base all other textures off that since grounds often tile, so once you've determined one unit of ground in my case 400cm looks too blurry at 1024 and too many repeats so I went with 400cm = 2048 pixels.

@@malcolm341 Hello thanks for the reply. I am still confused though. I tried doing your method (1x1 plane, apply 2048 texture, scale object/plane up). Unfortunately the texture did not seem to get blurry at all. The texture just scaled up proportionally along with the object/plane. Not sure if that is normal. Edit: It didn't work the way you described it for some reason but I would still like to understand the process. So basically what you're saying is if I want to set texel density I must: 1. Create plane, apply checker pattern with desired texture resolution. 2. Play around with the scale of the object (is it scale of object or UV?) until the texture on the plane looks good enough for the needs of your project (This is the part that didn't work for me.) 3. When it looks good enough, get texel density through UV texture editor. Is that correct? Thank you for your time! ^_^

@@circusmonkey28 Yes correct. Don't scale the UVs, the plane should have 0-1 UVs and then you should scale the geometry until you are happy with the size relative to character/camera. Which part didn't work, are you saying the texture never looked good and was always too blurry?. 1. Choose your texture size, sounds like you want to use 1024x1024 as your average size. 2. Create a plane 1x1cm big in Maya. 3. Apply the 1024 checker or grid texture to it. 4. Bring in a scale model of a human and scale the height of the person to be 182cm, that's 6 feet tall which is pretty average for North America I think. 5. Now we know how big a person is in your world, if you're using realistic scale anyways, and we have a tiny quad below them. 6. Scale the quad up until you think the texture looks acceptable compared to the person, for third person action games I recommend the quad be 200cm or smaller with a 1024 texture applied. You can see how big you scaled the quad by looking in the channel box on right side of Maya with the quad selected. You can go bigger or smaller with the quad depending on your taste and the needs of your project. When you're happy with how blurry or crisp the texture looks compared to the person write down the size of the quad from the channel box in our example 200cm. So that gives us 200cm = 1024 pixels and now you're stuck with that for the rest of the assets you create for the world. 7. Now as you unwrap other objects you can always compare them to that 200cm quad with grid texture, just apply that same grid texture to any asset and place the asset on top of the quad, if the checkers look different sizes on your other assets you have a texel density mismatch. This is generally fine if the checker are smaller on your props, for grounds/walls/buildings this is not okay. 8. The issue here is you have three variables that can all affect the final outcome of texel density, scale of object, scale of UVs, and distance from camera so it's best to lock down your texel density first before you build anything then you have a baseline to follow.

@@malcolm341 The part that didn't work was after i applied tbe texture to the quad, I scaled the object up. The checker texture didnt change when I scaled the quad up. As I understand it, if I scale the quad up, I expected the texture to become blurrier/sharper. That didn't happen. The texture scaled up with the quad. It did not become blurrier/sharper.

@@circusmonkey28 it won't actually get blurrier, it will just be lower rez than what's around it. Make two quads leave one quad at let's say 100cm, and scale the other quad to 800cm the 800cm quad will look blurry compared to the 100cm quad.

Yes exactly, when you mirror and stack it's called butterflying.

Thanks for your positive feedback. I don't think their is a way to scale multiple UV shells around their local pivots, it appears UVs always scale around the selection's pivot by default. As a work around you could scale each UV shell separately one at a time, if you need them to be scaled exactly you can type the value into the scale tool and then apply it to each shell one at a time.

malcolm341 thank you for your tip. 👍👍

Hey sure no problem, yes what you say all sounds correct. Rocks - Generally you use a tiling material at texel density, then you have an unwrapped normal map on top of that, then you have a detail map tiled more than the texel density. This can all be achieved with a single UV set by just tiling two of the layers in Unreal. Buildings - usually a combination of multiple tiling textures and trim sheets, extra geometry is added to allow the trim sheets to be reused, the flat areas of the building are filled in by the tiling textures. The details page was not referring to detail map, but you should use that too when available. Details would be unwrapped parts that are at texel density and can give the building a less tiled look, like some specific details like windows, depends on the type of building. You can also float decals to add some unique grime to areas to break up the tiling look further. Here's a good video on trim sheets and how they work. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IziIY674NAw.html

@@malcolm341 Ty you are the best :)

Thanks for your nice comment! The short answer is all those other tutorials you've watched sound like they're giving incorrect or bad advice, or over simplifying the concept. Could be the person explaining it hasn't worked long enough as a professional 3D artist in the games industry to understand the topic. In the film industry you'll have more flexibility because texture memory is not as tightly managed because the film is rendered to still frames. In games everything needs to fit into memory at all times constrained by the console or pc limitations. In film they often use something called UDIM tiles so unwrapping your model with even texel density and then throwing 400+ 2k textures at the model is totally valid. In games we don't have that luxury. If someone from games has told you to leave lots of empty UV space in your UV layout just to make sure the texel density across the model is perfectly even this is bad advice. You should always try to overlap repeated elements, tile parts of the texture, and scale up small details if you've got some wasted space left over. As well, if your model unwraps poorly into a square texture with lots of wasted space you can also try a rectangular texture and it may fit better. There are two main problems in games with UV layouts: 1. Texel density is not even across a single prop and looks bad. 2. Texel density is not even across the world, props are too low rez up close, grounds look high rez when compared to props, some props are lower rez than the prop right beside it. All of these problems are solved by first determining your average texel density for your whole game, then making sure your art team sticks to that metric for all assets that are created. In Triple A games the consumer expects a certain level of quality, they don't want to see blurry textures or texel density mismatch between grounds and props. So if the ground tiling texture looks good in game, but the artist fully unwrapped their prop into 0-1 UV space and the props sits on the ground it may look lower rez. In 2006 I was taught about texel density for open world games at EA and since then every game I've worked on we always compare the prop to the ground during UV layout, if the checker texture looks blurrier on the prop you must find cleaver ways to optimize the UV layout until the checkers get smaller, stacking UV shells, tiling parts of the UVs, using more than one texture occasionally. For games this is standard practice across the industry, for film you'll have more flexibility how the assets are unwrapped.

@@malcolm341 Wow! I can't thank you enough for this detailed response this is extremely helpful. I really appreciate the time you spent to answer this. This was just the answer I needed and clarifies a lot!

@@Raphmyster Not a problem, thanks for letting me know you found the info useful.

@@malcolm341 Really useful insights subscribed!

Right on, thanks for letting me know.

The function of texel density is to determine the size of the UVs you want relative to the texture size you apply before creating the final texture. If you've already determined how big you want the UVs then you've already set your texel density. From there just export your model as .fbx or whatever format you need and than texture it in Substance Painter, Quixel Mixer, or Marmoset Toolbag.

Hi Andrew, for walls and ground the model can be any size you like, then you just tile the texture outside of the 0-1 UV range. To match the tiling texture exactly to 400 like the video you can use a planar map and type in 400 or you can use the set texel density tool with the 5.12 setting, or you can use the sew to UV trick I showed in the video. Often for complex walls with scifi details we'll use a tiling texture for the large flat surfaces, then use a second texture laid out in what we call a trim sheet that tiles horizontally only. We will then "trim" all the details to get the best of both worlds for large walls, while still keeping the exact texel density we set to accomplish. This is a very common practice in games to save texture memory and keep resolution high for large architectural models. Here's an example image of what I'm talking about. drive.google.com/open?id=1vl9flmcHfb5E0HLqXKcKTXgce6Ald1yo

@kissfabian Typically for architecture and other larger props you have to use a combination of multiple textures with some parts unwrapped, some parts tiling, and some trims sheets. This video is great at explaining how to texture large things for games. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QcqJckp_q3M.html

@Joel Wynd Hi Joel, 10.24 if you're using 2k textures is about double what I'm used to working with for 3rd person shooters. I think Battlefield last I heard was using 512px =100cm in Maya which I believe is the same as 2048px = 400cm in Maya, but don't quote me on that they may have changed it when Battlefield 1 came out. To answer your question, generally small props can fit onto a single 2k texture and maintain the texel density you're after, but for grounds, buildings, rocks, large props we have to use a bunch of different techniques to keep texel density high and it's quite challenging and takes thousands of hours to master. Typically for environment stuff we'll use multiple textures including tiling textures, trim sheets, and some unwrapped details sheets. For rocks we typically use an unwrapped normal map in 0-1 UV space, but then that overlays on top of a tiling texture to keep resolution high. On top of all those techniques we use decals and vert painting to keep things from looking too tily and trimy. Here's a great tutorial for an introduction to trim sheets and tiling textures. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IziIY674NAw.html

@@malcolm341 thanks so much. Great link will definitely implement this into my scene :))

Yes absolutely, this happens all the times in game creation to hit texel density without adding more textures. The only thing you need to watch out for is repeated details, it's all an challenging balancing act with each asset.

@@malcolm341 At the end of method 1, when you have the really big plane, it doesn't end there, right? You still have to go through the process of chopping it up to overlap itself like you do later in the video? Why do you have to do that manually? Isn't there some way to "tile" the texture and just tell it to repeat across the rest?

@@alexcarr5439 There is no requirement to overlap and fit UVs into the 0-1 space unless your project calls for it. Tiling textures are acceptable, but will have repeated tiled patterns and you need to use other tricks to break up the tiling. Large environment assets for games often use tiling textures that go outside the 0-1 range.

Thanks for your feedback, a couple other people have also asked for UV mapping tutorial on a real object. I'm strapped for time these days, but it's definitely on the list of things to do.

Unfortunately you can't unwrap buildings into the 0-1 UV space they're just too big. To get around this for games you need to stack UV shells, make use of tiling textures, and use trim sheets and unique unwrapped parts. Typically on Gears of War 5 we would use three 2048x2048 textures for one building and then try to re-use those textures on similar buildings to make difference shapes. Here's a link to understanding trim sheets which will hopefully lead you in the right direction ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IziIY674NAw.html

If it's a tiling texture it won't matter, you'd just need to line up the tile so it ends on the 2x1 boundary, so the ground would be 800cm x 400cm and the tiling would still by 400 and it would work.

512x400cm is not a valid measurement, your wall piece should be 800x400cm or 1024x512 or something like that. For tiling to work it will need to be 2x1 or 1x2 to avoid having a seam. For modular walls you'll always want exactly half for the height or width and that half should be the base texel density. So for the example in this video I'd go with 800x400cm to make a wall that is longer than it is tall and then the tiling should end exactly on the boundary of the top and side of the mesh. As well, make sure to check the UV editor because planar maps often oringinate in the center of the UV space which is not what you want for modular layout since that will never tile correctly you want it snapped to the bottom left corner or which ever corner you're going to use for the rest of your pieces.

@@malcolm341 imgur.com/a/zDZAtUJ heres my issue. So this is a 2x2m plane with a piece of 1x2. UVs are bottom left for both. One seam side tiles nicely while the other when duplicating to the other side does not. The texel density is a 1024x1024 texture with 512px per 100cm so it fits the square perfectly. One solution I can think of is to cut the 1x2 piece in the middle and move the second edge towards the left origin seam. Basically mirroring it. Is that the way to go? Also I have one more question. Say I wanted to use a TD of 5,12. Is it recommended to use a 2048x2048 texture? The problem I have when using your TD settings (2048px per 400m) is that when I have a pice that is lets say a 1x1m wall, I cant have it tile, or hardly can tile it.

Thanks for your comment. 1. I'm not too sure what you're asking here, could you post an image of your question. It sounds like Mesh A is large in scale and Mesh B is small in scale which would cause different grid sizes. 2. Yes, after the UV mapping is done you can just plug in a smaller texture and that would half the texel density. A common practice in games is to author textures at a larger resolution with defined texel density and then have to scale them down by half later to fit everything into memory.

@@malcolm341 1. Mesh.A is true large in scale like a Tent and Mesh.B is an Axe. 2. Yes, after the UV mapping is done you can just plug in a smaller texture and that would half the texel density (this is what I've done after searching this texel density I find that my Mesh.B has a 2K Map and when I set it to 5TD under 2048px it turns that it is small almost like 128px but then again I just make it 512) A common practice in games is to author textures at a larger resolution with defined texel density and then have to scale them down by half later to fit everything into memory. (my axe texture was 2K and I just scaled it down to 512 and avoid 256 = is this how it done once you get the Texel density you will "JUST" adjust the texture map resolution or scale it down) ? appreciate it dude learned and realize something is wrong with my procedure but this give me a overview.

@@pawpotsRS, yes typically if you set the texel density first for your whole scene, ground, architecture you will probably use 400cm in Maya = 2048 pixels, then you might create a prop which is much smaller than 400cm in Maya, but because the prop is so small it should be easy to get a texel density of 400cm in Maya = 2048 pixels or even higher, so smaller grid size when you place the axe on the ground. This gives you 3 options, you can unwrap more unique faces of the axe instead of having to stack shells, you can leave the axe with smaller grid so it's actually over rez which is good for props since you often get close to them and zoom in, and you can scale the axe texture down by half when you're done if you find it wasteful, without having to touch the UVs. Typically it's okay to have the props be a little higher rez with smaller grid, it's kind of impossible to make sure everything matches up perfectly, but the ground, walls, and buildings should hit the correct target texel density since they'll use tiling textures and trims so there's no excuse.

@@malcolm341 hi thank you for your immediate response I get it on some point now, gonna study it more since my only solution after completing the texture without realizing the TD, I just scale down the texture map to half of 1K to 512 for the other since this is where they land after found out that they are really small in 2K Rez.

Maya has always had great UV tools, 3DS Max should be pretty similar though as far as I know.

@@malcolm341 I've been using it for 10 years and I can guarantee you it doesn't have a built in solution. There's external scripts and plugins. Just jealous of the native functionality Maya has! >_

No this is incorrect, there has never been a rule that a 1024 texture map needs to be mapped to 10.24 texels. This myth seems to have originated from really old school level designers from the early 90's before texel density theory was established in the environment art community. The rule to follow is set your texel density for your whole game before you begin texturing things, then follow that as best you can for all objects. UV mapping is relative so you can technically map a 1024 texture to any number of texels. In my video I just mention the most common texel density I've worked with as a professional 3D artist which is 400 centimeters = 2048 pixels. I've read about other games that map 200 centimeters = 1024 pixels, affectively the same resolution in world space, but double the tiling. I think Battlefield uses 500 centimeters = 2048 which is too low in my opinion.

@@malcolm341 hi, www.artstation.com/artwork/qbOqP this is the link of that info I just posted. may I ask you have discord? some are clear and some are still a puzzle to me. I used blender for measuring my texel density. at first okay setting up one mesh with 1024 grid then the small one with 256 grid they are all equal in grid is this okay that is why I posted also that my texture set becomes 1024 and 256 to.

Usually you can use unfolding for more organic shapes. I generally start with a camera based planar project and then modify the UVs from there, or I gridify the UVs. It really depends on what you're mapping. I try to gridify pretty much everything.

I think in Subtance Painter if you want to stack UVs you need to move all the duplicate shells out of the 0-1 UV space by one tile in any direction. So first stack everything in Maya the way you like, then select all the stacked shells except for one and move them one tile over.

Electrified Shock generally no, but it really depends on the project. Generally for trees you'd tile the bark, and then use a second texture for the leaf cards. I have seen some unwrapped barks, but then you'll need to worry about blurry textures up close, or rely on some kind of multi-texturing technique to keep detail high while still unwrapping it.

@@malcolm341 ah okay. I have done trees that way - leaves as repetitive cards. For this game I'm working on we're using broccoli as trees, so it's not exactly a traditional tree. It sounds like I have some testing to do. I definitely appreciate both the video and response to my comment- I'll echo what others have said in that my fancy school degree never taught me to worry about texels. Appreciate the info and time 😊

Thanks a lot, glad you enjoyed it.

Texel density can't really be set in UVLayout, all you can do there is uniformly scale everything to pack nicely into the 0-1 UV space. You can turn on preserve 3D ratios if you'd like the shells to automatically adopt their relative scale to each other, but that will then be normalized to the 0-1 UV space. To keep the shells from overlapping just select the object instead of the actual UV shells this will pack them all together without overlap. If you'd like the shells to be a specific texel density and then layout without changing that texel density, first set the texel density of all the shells using the UV toolkit transform tab, there's a button called set there where you can type the value you want. Then do a UV layout and turn 3D ratio off and scale mode off, that will pack the shells into a square without changing their size at all.

For larger objects there are couple standard techniques to use. Mostly the trick is to use multiple textures, like 3 or 4 2k textures depending on what you're texturing. We use a combination of tiling textures, unwrapped details sheet, and what we call a trim sheet which has detail that tile horizontally, but not vertically. With these technique you can texture most large objects because you can fill in the big flat areas with the tiling texture, then model strips on the edges of architecture and use the trim sheets, then fill in any smaller details with unique details sheet. For large rocks you can use a second normal map unwrapped into 0-1 UV space, then apply a tiling texture underneath that, for more complex and very large objects there is also multi-texturing where you apply 3 or more tiling textures and then use vert painting in Unreal or Unity blend the texture in based on the vert colour you paint.

malcolm341 Thanks for the info!

it will be nice to see this info as video tutorial :D

Good idea, I'll put it on the list.

That's too bad Maya won't start, sorry I can't help with that. Max will use all the same concepts though as far as UV mapping, but the tools will have slightly different names. I'm also happy to answer any specific questions you have here. Besides that just doing a search for beginner tutorials is probably the easiest way to learn.

For Uvunwrpaing in Max check Matthew Marquit videos(The last is all what u will need) then download textools and in the bottom of the interface they have a similar function to malcom's maya 'get' Also check chamferzone for textools break down and domestika course about making props).Do note though that in most cases noone is using malcom's approach because either they don't know or its just small props

If you have a very small prop where everything fits into the target texel density feel free to unwrap it uniquely. If you can't hit your target texel density with unique unwrap you must stack shells and butterfly parts of shells. For parts of the model that aren't important I try to reuse other parts of the texture, but you could also consider giving it less texel density if you're sure it will never be seen up close.

@@malcolm341 thank you master, i love you

Good luck with your project.

Good question, guns are much smaller than the world so that helps a lot, some games use a 4k texture for the gun, or two 2k textures, from there you just mirror as much as you can and repeat details. A great way to learn efficient unwraps extract the models from a game and look at them, I did this one for Call of Duty so see their vert count and texture layout. Another great way to get this info is to purchase a gun model from a experienced 3D artist that understands game limitations and see how they did it. These will give you good insight I think. www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/oA2N/modern-shotgun-weapons-fps-vol-1-ue4-raw

​@@malcolm341 Thank you for the quick reply :) What I don't get is, say a handgun has around 30cm length, I set my ppcm to 20.48 or 2048/100 on the texttools *using max*, and somehow the definition is absolutly garbage lol the only way I get good results is if I scale the UV shells a lot, almost to the point of filling the whole UV space...now, where am I going to place the other 10 pieces left? I gotta be missing something else, 'cuz even if I overlap faces that could share the same texture, I see no possible way of fitting a whole gun into the same UV space with good textures. I'm pretty new at this as you might have noticed by now ahah

@@xmidima5786 2048/100cm is a very nice high texel density for any game, but texel density is relative to how close you push the camera in to look at the gun. So if you look close enough it will always look blurry. It's best to understand how big the character will be and one ground tile relative to the gun because perhaps you're just looking at the gun too close. You could do a quick planar map from the side view and apply a 2k checker texture to it and see how big the checkers are I usually use this texture drive.google.com/file/d/1KBgc2LmG_4W-PP42M1ZA7szvGH1THeRY/view?usp=sharing Also Max uses meters as it's default unit so perhaps texttools is using 2048/100 meters which would be very low texel density. You should easily be able to fit a gun side view projection into 0-1 UV space with a 2k or 4k texture and have the details hold up pretty good, but if you really want to know just purchase one of those gun models and take a look how the pros do it. Also Max may be downsampling your texture, haven't used Max since 2007, but it probably does something silly like shows you a 128x128 pixel version of the texture in the viewport. I'm not much of a gun guy or I'd just tell you the exact measurments. I know on Gears 5 we did the guns at 4k for the lancer and then scaled down to 2k in game and also used mirroring and stacking. I threw this together quickly, there is plenty of room to keep the texel density high with a single 2k map and gun unwrapping if you mirror one side. See how small the checkers are on the gun compared to the floor, I can push the camera right in close and still have lots of resolution. drive.google.com/file/d/1UnIPVQ00emvbN__H7TAbPFFeUz0IayEH/view?usp=sharing

@@malcolm341 Thank you so much for the info and the texture! I was planning on learning Maya aswell and now I'm so glad I found your channel! Cheers

@cgnovice2969 larger props and architecture have to use a combination of tiling and baked parts that you reuse and stack or tile parts of the texture. On very large assets multiple textures are used that combine stacking, tiling, and unwrapped/baked parts. You would still try to bake as much as you can knowing where you can stack or mirror those parts of the normal map. Only small props get unwrapped 0-1 and fully baked these days, and some teams are even using trim sheets to texture doors and windows now like the Last of Us Part 2 etc.

Yeah thats the part i dont understand. I never knew stacking was an option as any overlapping UV will get me massive artefacts in painter. Or do you mean stacking after I’ve baked mirrored UVs?

@@cgnovice2969 to use stacking with painter I believe you have to offset all the stacked UV shells over by one tile except leave one shell in place for Painter to paint and bake on. The resulting UV mapping will look identical, but you won't have overlap in Painter.

@erickh555 Great question, because you're changing both the map size and the texel density you're ending up with the same result. In your case you want density of 4k map 8.192 pix and if you want that same density across another object using a 2k map you should either change the map size to 2048, and then click the set button, or leave the map size as is and change the texel density to 16.384 both solutions will create the same final result. What I like to do when texel density confuses me is create a quad to the scale of one texture in world space to the size that I want it. In your case make a quad that's 500cm big and make sure the UVs are exactly 0-1 which should be there by default. Apply a checker texture to it and set map size to 4096, then click the get texel density button and look at what happens to the texel density field, it should read 8.192, now change the map size to 2k and click the get texel density button again, it will now read 4.096 indicating you will have half the pixels across the surface area if you use half the texture resolution. If you actually apply a 2k checker now it will look blurrier. To compensate and use the lower res texture, but have the same number of pixels across the surface area you would increase the texel density from 4.096 to 8.192 and set, effectively doubling the tiling giving you the same number of pixels across the surface area, but with more repeated pixels. Hopefully the make sense. When it doubt, just map one face the way you want and copy paste the texel density from it and never change the map size. I rarely change map size, and instead just copy paste from a face or manually input the texel density size.

@@malcolm341 thank you so much for the explanation, i knew i wasnt doing things the wrong way bc the checker was always the right scale but i wasnt able to understand the logic behind it, thanks a lot again! You have a Great channel with incredible information i subscribed as soon as i watched the video :)

@@malcolm341 i dont know if what i did was right, i have to do a gun with a texel density of 2px per 1cm, so i used a 1k x 1k texture and applied it to the 500cm X 500cm quad, thats the one i use to get the texel density from, but in texture size i used 4096 bc thats the resolution im working on substance, that gave me the 8.192 texel density but i dont know if that equals to the 2px per cm that my teammate asked me to do

@@erickh555 For UV layout and padding I would recommend UV mapping the mesh to the final texel density it will be delivered at and then just up-scaling in Substance using the project settings to make it 4k. So if the final texel density will be 1k map with 2px per 1cm I would recommend setting map size to 1024 and texel density to 2, but you should ask your lead how they like to do it for the project. What can be helpful to check your work in Maya is to make a texture that will be the final size in game, for you 1k, then make a checker where each square is 1 pixel. In Maya, make a 1cm quad, and apply the checker texture to it, turn off filtering in the file node so it doesn't blur and you can clearly see the pixels, then you can see at map size 1024 pix/unit should be to 2 and set that on the 1cm quad and you should see exactly 2 checker squares across the quad confirming that a 1k map will have 2pixels per 1cm.

I made my own hotkey, mine was Ctrl + Right Arrow, here's the code if you want to make your own polyRotateUVs 90 1;

Not really. Stacking UVs works fine, but in some bakers the additional stacked shells need to be offset out of the 0-1 UV space by one tile so the baker doesn't get confused. The tricky part with baking high to low is unwrapping some parts uniquely and baking and choosing which parts to stack and bake. For small props you can get away with just unwrapping the whole thing and baking high to low, for larger props, sections need to be repeated/stacked so it takes a lot of work and planning. Often when the prop gets too big we'd use one texture for unique baked details and another texture for trim or repeating patterns. It really depends on your exact model plus your desired texel density it's by for the most annoying part of making game assets.

Thanks a lot, it's different for each object shape. When an object gets too big to use overlapping methods you can use trim sheets, tiling textures, or additional unwrapped textures. Really depends on the shape and save of the object. For cylinders and long pipes we'll often using tiling textures or trim sheets. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IziIY674NAw.html

@@malcolm341 I watched Tims tutorial. Makes sense to use a trimsheet I guess. I just wonder what to do if I want to avoid repetetive textures. I have for example made an obelisk with different hieroglyph engravings and cracks all over the model. I then cut it in half so I use about 72% of the UV space. The seam is not very visible but I assume there is a smarter way to do it.

@@rickysargulesh1053 link me to an image of your model and I'll take a look. Also put a person in the image so I know how big the object is compared to a human.

@@malcolm341 Hey Malcolm, thanks a lot. Very nice of you to help me out. imgur.com/a/ItJoye3 I posted a picture of the baked model inside Substance with all the details and the checker texture inside Blender. I tried to get as close to the texel density you showed in your video but not really sure how I could solve this problem. I used the same units you did and a 2k map

@@malcolm341 Hey Malcolm. Did you see my response?

Great question, it's impossible to 3D paint overlapping UVs as you mentioned, it will always share the UV space so the same paint will show up there, but unwrapping your mesh 100% for Substance Painter isn't really a thing in games except on small props that you can hit the texel density on. For larger props you have to rely on stacking shells, mirroring, trim sheets, and tiling textures. It's still a painful tedious process texturing things for games and even on Xbox Series X we'll still be doing it this same way that hasn't changed much in 10 years. If you're having errors painting on stacked shells I believe you can move all but one of the stacked shells out of the 0-1 UV space by exactly one tile and that should allow you to paint correctly, but the UV space will still be shared. Kind of like baking normal maps where in some bakers you can't overlap UV shells.

@@malcolm341 Thanks for your answer :) I’m going to try that out.

It's on the list, but it won't come soon unfortunately. Have a look at this it might help you www.artstation.com/artwork/36EVg With the modular pieces you usually hide the texture borders with trim, or you can just build your modular pieces in halves or quarters so the textures always line up with the main pieces.

@@malcolm341 okiii, thank you!

Great question, basically it's just a lot of hard work and practice to hit your texel density and it's a new challenge for each asset. Seams are usually hidden in cracks or you end the UV on a natural normal map seam, or add a welding seam where the UVs end, or extrude geometry to hide it or something. This is easy for small props, the challenge comes from larger things where hitting texel density is impossible no matter how much you share the texture space. This is where multiple textures come in, also the use of trim sheets and tiling textures. Good explanation here of trim sheets. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IziIY674NAw.html Another great explanation here of texturing different size objects starts at 6:57 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-TkTQhmNFRnY.html

@@malcolm341 tq for the suggesions and answering my query