Texture Painting - Game Character Development with Maya - page 590

FIGURE 9.53 Reduce the crease on the bridge of her nose.
5. Our first step in reducing this crease is to split the polygons as shown in Figure
9.53b .
Next, split the polygons across her forehead as demonstrated in Figure 9.53c .
Finally, delete the edges highlighted in Figure 9.53d .
Figure 9.53e shows the reduced crease. Although it's not completely gone, it's better than
it was.
Continue to look around both character models to see if you can see any more areas that
need triangulating.
You've accomplished a great deal so far in this chapter. The textures are applied and en-
hanced, and the models have been fine-tuned. We're ready now to optimize the texture
pages.
Texture Bit Depth and Page Size
Texture memory is an important factor in game development. Keep your pages as small as
possible—the image size as well as the file size is important. Although you may have been
given a maximum texture limit, you'll get extra points if your character could look just as
good in less.
There are two ways you can do this: reducing the actual page size, and reducing the bit
depth. You can even combine reductions in both to get texture sizes down even more.
How far you can go with these reductions (or whether you can use them at all) depends on
your managers and the game you are developing, so always check this out with your team.
If you can, try and see both versions of the character—reduced and not reduced—running
inthegameengine,togetarealisticideaofhowtheywilllook.Rememberthatthingslook
completely different on a television screen than they do on a computer monitor, so it may
be that you can't see any difference in the reduced version. In that case, you have saved
some memory that can be used to polish the game elsewhere.
Page Size Reduction
Reducingthesizeofyourtexturepagesisadramaticwaytoreducetheoverallfilesize,but
on some characters this will leave you with unacceptable results. Let's begin by determin-
ing how big our textures currently are.
Withoutthealphamapsembedded,themain512x512pagesare769KBeach;the256x256
pages are 193 KB each. Immediately we can see that if we reduce the highest ones to
256x256, we will be saving 576 KB on each; that's enough to add roughly another three