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Recommend Storage Size for Texture Library

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Chrisasan, Apr 5, 2018.

  1. Chrisasan

    Chrisasan

    Joined:
    Mar 27, 2015
    Posts:
    270
    I have been reading the book, "3D Game Textures". One of the tutorials in the book is to collect textures. It recommended that I get an external harddrive. It however didn't tell me of what size is recommended.

    The reason I ask this question, is I think I could replace the HD with a USB Flash Drive of 128GB.
    Before taking on the task of buying a 128GB pen drive, I wanted to know if it really is enough space for a large texture library.

    Getting the flash drive would make it easy to carry around and transfer onto different computers. I could save a little bit of money too. I trust the pen drive more than I do a hard drive.
     
  2. BIGTIMEMASTER

    BIGTIMEMASTER

    Joined:
    Jun 1, 2017
    Posts:
    5,181
    You can reduce textures but you cannot increase them without pixel density loss. So save them at the largest size available.

    About collecting a huge library just for the sake of being a hoarder.... why not just collect textures as you need them? When you run out of space, you upgrade. Same goes for 3d models. I've got quite a few by now, but I only picked up stuff on an as needed basis.

    If you have to figure out how much space you need, just do some math. Look at all the texture files you have right now, average their size, and multiply to figure out how much space on average 100 texture files would take up, etc.
     
    Socrates likes this.
  3. Chrisasan

    Chrisasan

    Joined:
    Mar 27, 2015
    Posts:
    270
    I took some samples of JPG images from the internet. I found an average of 2.4 MB. That means a 32GB pen drive is enough for over 10,000 images. I will be getting a cheaper 32GB pen drive.
     
  4. BIGTIMEMASTER

    BIGTIMEMASTER

    Joined:
    Jun 1, 2017
    Posts:
    5,181
    I think JPG is not a common format you will be using in game engines.

    I'm not a tech artist, but from my limited experience I think the common formats are .png or targa. Has to do with compression formatting -- complicated stuff I haven't looked into.

    Then again, i was just looking through some of my own textures. Most of my targa files from gametextures.com are 12k kilobytes per texture, but interestingly my scanned textures from quixelmegascans are jpeg format and around 1k kbts per file.
     
    Chrisasan and angrypenguin like this.