TEXEL

DENSITY
TOPIC DEEP DIVE BY TIMOTHY DRIES

TIMOTHY DRIES BEYOND EXTENT

 WHAT IS TEXEL DENSITY?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Texel density (also referred to as pixel density or texture density) is measurement unit used to
make asset textures cohesive compared to each other throughout your entire world.
TABLE OF CONTENTS 2
It’s measured in pixels per centimeter (2.56px/cm) or pixels per meter (256px/m).
WHAT IS TEXEL DENSITY? 3

IMPORTANCE TO GAMES 3

SO, WHAT’S A “TEXEL” ? 4

TEXTURE & OBJECT SIZE 4 IMPORTANCE TO GAMES

DECIDING YOUR TEXEL DENSITY 5 In games, you quickly notice when there is a disconnect between items in the world when one
item’s textures looks blurry and the other looks crisp. This is often caused by a mismatch in texel
■ SCREEN RELATION METHOD
density and can pull the player out of that immersive feeling we’re trying to create.
■ FOR PERSONAL PROJECTS
While the resolution of these textures itself can change between games and game types, texel
HOW TO CALCULATE IT 6 density is about a consistant measurement value that’s game wide.

ADDONS TO USE 6 It’s also important to developers and specifically artists because it gives them a goal to work with
when it comes to texture resolution and it also stops them from going crazy with trying to make
APPROACHES TO DIFFERENT GAMES 7 everything look detailed and forgetting about the bigger picture. Which is important when
■ FIRST PERSON GAME trying to create full environments or even entire worlds.
■ THIRD PERSON GAME

■ TOP DOWN GAME

DIFFERENT WORKFLOWS 9
■ UNIQUE ASSETS

■ TILEABLE TEXTURES

■ TRIMSHEETS

ESTIMATING TEXEL DENSITY WITH PROXY MODELS 10

OPTIMISATION OVER DISTANCE 11

■ VISTA MESHES
HIGHLIGHT
■ MANUAL OPTIMISATION BLURRY TEXTURES
People are getting pulled out of the immersion
LIMITATIONS TO SCALING IN SOME IN HOUSE ENGINES 12 And remember that it’s a game when they see these

SOURCES 13
SPECIAL THANKS
CREDIT UBISOFT - FARCRY 6 CREDIT REMEDY ENTERTAINMENT - CONTROL

These screenshots are an indication of what wrong texel density might look like, but these do not necessarily represent developers forgetting
to set correct texel density on the assets.

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SO, WHAT’S A “TEXEL” ? DECIDING YOUR TEXEL DENSITY
IMAGE EXAMPLE TEXTURE MAP EXAMPLE

SCREEN RELATION METHOD

One way of calculating texel density is to see how close you can get to your assets in your game,
see how big it is on screen and relate this size (In pixels) on your screen to your texture size.

SIZE OF ASSET ON SCREEN

RELATING THE ASSET SIZE TO THE
SCREEN SIZE.
SEE HOW MANY PIXELS THIS ASSET
MAXIMUM TAKES UP ON YOUR SCREEN.

HIGHLIGHT HIGHLIGHT 1920 PX

PIXEL TEXEL
Rows and Columns of pixels make up an image. Rows and Columns of Texels make
up a texture map.

1080 PX
Texel stand for TEXture pixEL or texture element. You can compare this to the relation between a
pixel that makes up an image, but in this case it’s a texel that make a texture map. Making a texel
the smallest element that represents a texture map.

A GPU (Your Graphics Card in your PC) takes these texels and projects them onto the pixels on CREDIT TIMOTHY DRIES
your screen through texture mapping (This is why we have UV’s).

FOR PERSONAL PROJECTS

Make it look as good as possible, and use recent game art as examples. Something like

TEXTURE & OBJECT SIZE 40.96px/cm or 20.56px/cm will be more than enough to work with. Don’t go crazy with using
8k or 16k textures, show that you are capable of working withing game art restrictions.
Your texel density depends on two things, OBJECT SIZE and the TEXTURE RESOLUTION.
Just make sure that you can’t really see any obvious pixelation on your asset that gives away
THIS MEANS: that it’s a game asset look. This goes hand in hand with making good UV’s and having
Increased texture resolution & same object scale = Higher Texel Density (Less blurry texture) appropriate textures as well though, so keep that in mind.
Same texture resolution & Increased object scale = Lower Texel Density (Blurrier Texture)

HIGHER TEXEL DENSITY BASE TEXEL DENSITY LOWER TEXEL DENSITY

100% SCALE 100% SCALE 200% SCALE
2048 X 2048 TEXTURE 1024 X 1024 TEXTURE 1024 X 1024 TEXTURE
RESOLUTION RESOLUTION RESOLUTION
CREDIT MATTHIAS DEVELTERE

20.48 PX/CM 10.24 PX/CM 5.12 PX/CM

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HOW TO CALCULATE IT APPROACHES TO DIFFERENT
If you want to do it manually we can use the following calculation using the RESOLUTION OF GAMES
THE TEXTURE divided by the OBJECT SIZE giving us the TEXEL DENSITY. Giving us the following
equation.
FIRST PERSON GAME
Games where we are the eyes of the main character allow us to also look at things really
closeby, so these games usually have the highest texel density to compensate for this fact.

TEXTURE RESOLUTION OBJECT SIZE TEXEL DENSITY

2048px / 100cm = 20,48px/cm

ADDONS TO USE
CREDIT FARCRY 6 CREDIT DESTINY 2 CREDIT WOLFENSTEIN THE NEW ORDER

Some examples for addons are: THIRD PERSON GAME

BLENDER: These games are usually further away from the visual aspects of the scene itself. So we can go
Texel Density Checker for a slightly lower texel density and maybe replace this with more asset density.
https://mrven.gumroad.com/l/CEIOR

MAYA:
Built in Texel Density tools.

MAX:
Built in one with UV Editor.Texel Density tool, found here:
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/texel-density-tool

CREDIT THE DIVISION 2 CREDIT ASSASSINS CREED VALHALLA CREDIT HORIZON FORBIDDEN WEST

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 TOP DOWN GAME
DIFFERENT WORKFLOWS
The games that are usually the furthest away from the camera, so no need to go crazy on the
texel density for these and it can be lower. Usually items that can be inspected or are more
important will receive a bigger texel density.
UNIQUE ASSETS
TIP OUTLIERS

There are outliers to these

games, like strategy
games where you can
walk in first person or first
person games that allow
you to take the camera
high up. Those work by
different rules.

CREDIT PLANET COASTER CREDIT DIABLO 4

CREDIT TIMOTHY DRIES

Texel Density for Unique Assets is pretty simple, you can just use a texel density tool to get as
close to the desired texel density as possible, making sure you use the most of your UV space.

You can also scale up or down UV islands depending on how much of the assets will be visible or
the importance of that part of the asset.

TILEABLE TEXTURES
For tileable textures we can also just use a texel density calculator, and that’s done!
However, we can also change the formula to calculate the tiling value we need for our material
too, using the calculation below.

(ASSET SIZE) (TEXEL DENSITY IN METER)

METERS x PIXEL PER METER (MATERIAL TILING VALUE)

= TILING VALUE
TEXTURE RESOLUTION

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 OPTIMISATION OVER DISTANCE
ADJUSTED TO TRIMSHEET PASS
MOVED AND SCALED PIECES TO CLOSEST
SECTION THAT MATCH SCALE ON TRIMSHEET

A lot of optimisation happens in game engines already (With LEVEL OF DETAIL Meshes and MIP
MAPPING) and artists can have an input on it if needed, but it’s less and less of a requirement
with rendering techniques becoming less and less limited by technology.

VISTA MESHES
There are exceptions to this though, like specifically created Vista LOD Meshes, which are
meshes rendered at higher detail then what they would normally would be at that distance. This
is super useful for big landmarks or points of interest that are important for player navigation.

TEXEL DENSITY PASS

SINGLE WOODEN PLANK AS EXAMPLE TIP MIPMAPS
UNWRAPPED AND THEN SCALED USING A TEXEL DENSITY TOOL
VISTA MESH
OFTEN MANUALLY CREATED
Mipmaps are
TRIMSHEETS FOR MAXIMUM VISUAL FIDELITY
automatically generated
smaller version of any
For trimsheets you want to match your trimsheet layout as well as match the texel density of the texture (on import in most
scene. So first apply the texel density to the UV islands (or asset) and then scale them towards engines) used for switching
the sections that fit the closest to that. between them over
distance.
Usually, the limit here is something around 25% up or down, big enough to give some freedom
but small enough to not break visual consistency either. So this means that an
engine will do optimisation
over distance on it’s own as
well.
ESTIMATING TEXEL DENSITY WITH
PROXY MODELS CREDIT HORIZON FORBIDDEN WEST

PROXY MODEL
A SIMPLE APPROXIMATION
OF YOUR BASE MODEL MANUAL OPTIMISATION
There might be moment where you need to go into certain area’s and manually optimise them
for performance as needed. This might mean a bunch of different things, lowering the texture
resolution (Thus lowering the texel density) or even manually optimising LOD meshes.

ACTUAL ASSET
THE BASE MODEL WE
WANT TO BUILD AN APPROXIMATION FOR

For a quick estimation you can always take the rough dimensions of your current model or even
make a proxy model that encompasses the model itself and then do a quick calculation based on
that to know if.

This is really helpful when you don’t have the object modelled yet and want to check what
texture size you will be needing. If you’ve done this a couple of times you might even get quick
CREDIT UNCHARTED 4: A THIEF’S END
enough to skip the proxy model all together and do a rough estimation yourself.

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WHEN TO DEVIATE FROM IT? SOURCES
CHARACTERS WEAPONS

- Texel Density and other texture theory (https://antodonnell.gumroad.com/l/rHAIO)

- All You Need to Know about Texel Density - Leonardo Lezzi (Texel Density: All you need to
know HQ PDF)

- Texel Density : What It Means & How To Use It (https://youtu.be/Za5AIQXwqCs)

- Discussion: Talking Texel Density (https://youtu.be/ZL5nToMpjp8)

CINEMATIC PROPS VISTA OBJECTS
- What is Texel Density and How to Master it (https://youtu.be/5e6zvJqVqlA)

- What is Texel Density? - A Layman's guide.

(https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qA1lDy)

Understanding Texel Density

(https://youtu.be/rWJRekLpXXU)

How to find the right texel density for your asset

There are situations in games where the team behind it decides to break texel density. (https://youtu.be/iL2iXizf9xM)

Most of these have to do with importance to the player or where you can get really close to the
asset itself. Some examples include weapons in first person games, assets that will be shown in
special cinematics, menu or inspectable objects or maps that need extra detail because they
help the player navigate the game world, to name a few.

LIMITATIONS TO SCALING IN
SOME IN HOUSE ENGINES
This came to a surprise to me as well, but a lot of the in house engines I’ve worked with prohibit
(or block you from submitting to source control) when you are trying to scale items. And is
partially done to keep a consistent look in the game but not allowing you to break texel density.

SPECIAL THANKS
Scot Daniel Burns, Raj Joshi

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