Actually the landscape tiles are a pretty big "object" in skyrim, it's right after rocks in the terms of profiting from a 4k.Aiyen wrote:Like kontrapunkt says... bigger is not always better.
In most cases you wont even see the 4k mipmap, but the lower resolution ones. The only time you really see the big one is on large models, and up close. Otherwise it will be the 2k and 1k or lower you see anyways. However you still load in everything.
For me 4k is mainly reserved for characters and armors, and stuff you want to see up close. Also 4k on characters does help reduce artifacts. I prefer 4k with compression over 2k without for example.
Another issue with 4k is the amount of detail you can put into the texture. It just makes so that it does not fit at all. It is really difficult to actually create consistent textures at higher resolution that does not overdo it. Especially with landscape.
One thing that really annoys me with some of the 4k ones is that they do not tile very well at all. This is not an issue if you have grass covering up the majority of your gameworld.. but I do not and hence I do see the tiling and it is just not pretty.
in that case even a 1k will actually look overall better.. as long as you do not stare directly down into the ground and look at only one pebble.
4k tiles exactly the same as 2k or 1k. I think you just downloaded a 4k that's actually a 4 x 2K texture (I have done that, too)
Of course the texture needs not only to be seamless but to have nearly the same brightness/color at the edge (I have made that mistake, too)
Or otherwise the tiling will be more visible.
4k with compression is always better than 2k without, as long the object isn't too small. Or if we are talking about normal maps, then it's roughly the same, but the 2k is easier to change afterwards and faster to save.
@Kontrapunkt: Real Girls are fantastic textures. But it's simple math. Face textures use ~90% of the 4096x4096. If you have a closeup of the face you look at everything but the back.
Let's say that's ~70%. Now you are still at 25850x2580 and your monitor only displays 1920x1080. And with stuff as pixel density and human's having small pores, you can see barely a difference between compressed and uncompressed, because the monitor only displays 2/3 of wrong pixels because of the compression and also because it's hard to see a wrong one which is a slightly darker pink than it should be.
If you have a 4k monitor, which are getting cheaper and cheaper, now that's a whole different story.
Working on roads again, still a wip as it needs quite a bit polishing. Parallax, normals and specular isn't good enough yet.