Texturing Size Issues

Is there any texture artists here on Simply? I've been searching the net for a few hours now trying to get my head around resolution sizes etc.

I've got a front of a building that I'm working on, and in Maya it's 1506cm wide - (15m) and I want the texture to be quite high res, as the camera will be getting pretty close to it, and I just want it to look pretty neat.

So i go ahead and create a UV map, and export it to Photoshop, now here's where I get ever so confused, how big do i want to export it from Maya to Photoshop? I've usually left the settings to their defaults at 2056 x 2056. I then open the UV Snapshot in photoshop and I go ahead and whack a texture map of some bricks I've got onto as the texture. But when i open the texture in photoshop, and put it onto the same canvas as UV, the texture JPEG is like twice the size of my UV Snapshot.

I've edited the texture so that it is tillable, and by making some quick maths, a building 15m long would need about 75 bricks. The tillable image I've got has 6 bricks in it, so in order for the image to be in scale with the model i need about 12 copies of the tillable image tilled together to span across the whole width of the building.

Now, because the JPEG texture is about twice the size of my UV, i need to scale it down considerably so i can have the 6 bricks to be in scale with the building, and by doing this, the image just get mega pixalated, and is'nt very pretty at all. And if i do the vice versa, by actually scalling up the UV Snapshot to fit the texture image, im going to end up with one huuuuuge canvas to work with, and that will just kill my computer in an instance.

Any help on this would be great!
Thanks

sounds like you are losing resolution when you scale the image down, are you converting your texture to 72 dpi? or leaving it at 300 or what?

Generally, If you scale the image down using bicubic sampling, you shouldn't really have much problem with texture degradation during a scale down operation. You might want to check your photoshop settings and see if that's the case.

-z

Hey all - What I tried doing just now was to actually make a procedural shader, so I plugged in the colour map into the colour slot of the shader, and applied it to the front wall - then i increased the 'Repeat UV' to 12 in the LMB Inputs, and it works fine! But - it's as it is, I want to add some variation in the texture, I wanted to add some dirt and grime over the texture etc, so I'm gonna have to cancel that idea.

I seriously can't get my head around this whole situation. My UV Snapshot from Maya comes out as 72.53 x 72.53 cm, at 72 dpi, but the texture itself I want to use it 99.1 x 57.29 cm, and at 72 dpi. So you know to fit 12 copies of the texture to fit the span on the building i want to decrease the size of the actual texture to 8.26 x 4.77cm - does this sound right?

But whenever I do this, the texture just gets hammered, and becomes pixelated.

Hey, your procedural shader idea is a good one - far less memory intensive for rendering. Adding grime is easy too; just map a low-contrast fractal or something similar to the color gain of your texture.

I made a quick and dirty procedural brick texture in Maya 8. Not perfect (the rough texture of the bricks is a bit repetitive) but it allows you to make use of the grid texture for bump mapping. I've done a screengrab of the network, but it's not immediately obvious what's going on! PM me your email address and I'll send over the project file if you're interested.

Christian

Just wanted to add one thing I noticed. Use Targa format for file textures...don't use JPEG as it's a lossy file format and quality is lost with it. Maya "likes" Targa file format too so it helps with memory issues a bit.