https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyTd1Zs82dU

Contents

📜 About

This tool was created to debug and optimise texture usage in Unreal Engine projects. It does this by highlighting what the maximum resolution is needed for any given asset. A side affect of how this works is it also shows UV inconsitencies and the affects of screen resolution on how textures are sampled. The mix of these 3 properties of the tool make it incredibly easy to understand how textures are used inside of game engines and therefor debug issues that can form from them.

To use this tool is incredibly easy and runs in real time. Simply assign the given material to your model or the debugging texture to your shader, then move your camera to the nearest position relative to the object that the player would stand and the diagnosis will already be present.

📒 Index

In the following document there will be some uncommonly used terms to describe certain aspects of art. Listed below are some of the lesser used terms and what I mean when I use them.

• Texel Density - Texel density is a term used to describe the pixels per unit that a texture and UV combination form. A high pixels per unit count is indicative of a high texel density and would be described as “this texture has a texel density of 10.24 pixels per unit.” Or in other words a plane thats 1 meter by 1 meter has 10.24 texture pixels for each centermeter covered. Note: texel density for a plane will always match the resolution of the texture divided by 100 (1 meter).
• Mip Map - A mip map is LODs for textures. You can think of them as autogenerated copies of your texture, repeated until the texture is 1 by 1 pixel tall.
• Screen Percentage - Screen percentage is a measure of how large the asset is in screen space. Something that covers the entire screen would have a percentage of 100%. This is screen resolution independent.
• Screen Resolution - This is the pixels x by y that your monitor or application window covers. Some standard resolutions look like - 1280x720 ,1920x1080, 3840x2160
• UV Formats - UVs come in many shapes and forms, from autogenerated to procedural and hand tailored. For simplicity ill be using three common UV formats, standard, lightmap and triplanar. Standard UVs are those that an artist would create inside a DCC application (3d modelling package like Blender or Maya).
• Video Memory (VRAM) - This is part of the GPU on most modern systems. This is the component that holds a reference to shaders, models and textures to allow for quick and efficient rendering.

🔴 Texture Optimiser Setup

🟠 UV Consistency Auditing

One of the most valuable uses of this tool is in diagnosing UV consistency issues. In larger projects with multiple artists, it’s easy for texel density to become inconsistent across assets, leading to noticeable variation in how textures appear.

By using this tool, you can quickly compare texel density across models to ensure visual consistency throughout the project. This helps prevent textures from looking sharper or blurrier than others in the same scene. It also highlights assets that may be using unnecessarily large textures, and even reveals opportunities to consolidate assets onto shared texture sheets, reducing the overall number of materials and textures.