Vector Textures - Possible? Good or bad? Thread

Well, i think the title says most of it.

I was wondering if it would make sense to save textures in a vector format instead of a bitmap style format. Am i right to say that it would make sense for simple textures that need little calculating time?

Thanks for reading at all

I think that would be possible with a shader language like GLSL or Cg, yeah.

well, i was thinking of already creating the textures with a vector software rather than vectorizing images. i was just wondering if it made sense to use that in an online game where people could fully customize their character/car/whatever using vector images. just to save bandwidth.

Minuit wrote: Would work great in a cartoon-style game though.

True

I'd love to use svg (real-time texture upload and good scaling) for my game, but the problem is painting them.

i dont see how vector based graphics could be used well in anything other than a cartoon/comic style game. The greatest feature of Vectors are the fact that the artwork can be scaled and pro'd to be either bigger or smaller, without losing any dots per inch. it would be good for things like, building signs/graphics, or stuff similar, but for characters/props, your better of having your texture rasterised.

Well, put it this way, it can be considered a method for procedural texturing to see where to put what thanks to help with vectors, it doesn't have to be cartoony.

It'd also be a very good technique for drawing more abstract graphics.

for realistic characters, i think a combination of both could work, too. choose a basic skin texture, and add different thinks like scars, crinkles, areas of dakrer/brighter skin, freckles and other stuff, same could apply for anything. i am asking because i wonder how one could make a better character editor than the ones in games like PES 09, Fallout 3 or Oblivion. Those are in many parts pretty limited.

BTW: vector textures would give the opportunity to freely choose texture resolution, so people with a better computer (or an extremely powerful machine, maybe in 10 years) could go for the hardcore 8192x8192 instead of 512x512. Or it would run on a very old machine by choosing 32x32

Am i right?

Edited by: SeriousMoh

BTW: vector textures would give the opportunity to freely choose texture resolution, so people with a better computer (or an extremely powerful machine, maybe in 10 years) could go for the hardcore 8192x8192 instead of 512x512. Or it would run on a very old machine by choosing 32x32

Am i right?

Vector textures shouldn't have a resolution in their nature, otherwise they'd be raster.

I don't really see the benefits to them myself, as I've never seen a vector imagine contain too much visual information. It could be good for text, but I'm not sure what else it could really do that current textures and shader instructions can't (have any visual examples for me?).

Cryid is right on the resolution score - the whole point of Vector images is that they're completely independant of display resolution.

They can have a purpose though. Consider a user interface built with them? Most UIs have horrible scaling issues. A Vector image based one would not.

I wasn't really counting UI elements / 2d overlays as textures. I was thinking more of the character / prop kind.

Cryrid wrote: Vector textures shouldn't have a resolution in their nature, otherwise they'd be raster.

to make things a little clearer, i'll explain what i was thinking. i was indeed talking about character textures. if a vector texture was used, wouldn't the computer still have to convert it into a raster image upon rendering? that was the resolution i was talking about, not the display resolution. more details in a texture and a higher texture resolution would then result in more cpu time needed, but better looking results.

anyway, i think i already havea few other approaches/ideas on how to make character editors perfect (or at least a lot better).

It's what 64k demos are doing. It's simply procedural textures which in the end are samples to a fixed-resolution texture during loading time. It's not a stupid idea. See KKrieger for an example. It would cut down disk space of games tremendously. On the other hand it would require artists to think different since such kind of textures are created differently than your typical bitmap textures are.

guess where i got the idea from.

but i think you could combine raster and vector textures. at least for a character editor. just take a basic body texture (raster) and add changes like bruises, scars, tattoos, piercings, wrinkles, whatever (based on raster images) and just save the position and shape (as vectors). that would imo increase customization options while keeping the bandwidth low.

Why would you be sending textures across a network anyway?

multiplayer online game where you have complete freedom about your looks. not just sets of things you can choose from. those, too, but also infinite ways of styling, if you want them

Edited by: SeriousMoh

You don't send that down a network, that's just stupid. Save and send the data used to generate the player? A series of a few bytes of information about positions and scalings is always going to be better than a texture.

thats exactly what i mean, maybe i didnt say it right, sorry
information about position, scaling, shape is (something like) vector, is it not?

sorry if i got the terms mixed up

If you just want scars or such things then you are better of with decals. As mentioned by 'shee you need only the geometric parameters of the decal to send. Gives anyways better results since the decal texture resolution is independent of the body texture resolution.

oh, didn't think of that... thanks. now that i thnk of it this is actually a lot better

guess we finished it, huh

Well, if you used vectors, you could easily change the formula the comp uses to figure out the angles/ positioning of the points/ lines etc, at certain times/ triggers/ effectsm, and you could make some really trippy shit happen.
Just a thought : P

This isn't a bad idea, but you're limited in what you can create quickly. The layers of detail on a realistic model couldn't be pulled off easily. Every scratch and stain would have to be either vectorized from an image or drawn, never mind the gradients and opacities you'd need to apply to match it to reality. That's an extra step you could skip by just using raster. That said, you could probably make something sleek and clean to pretty good effect, as has been said before.

Diffuse textures aren't eating up all that much processing power, it's moving around polys, shaders and lighting solutions.

grinnock wrote: Diffuse textures aren't eating up all that much processing power

They eat up a lot of disk space though.

well...

aerozol wrote: Well, if you used vectors, you could easily change the formula the comp uses to figure out the angles/ positioning of the points/ lines etc, at certain times/ triggers/ effectsm, and you could make some really trippy shit happen.
Just a thought : P

Do you mean that in a good way or a bad way? I don't really get it, sorry.

grinnock wrote: This isn't a bad idea, but you're limited in what you can create quickly. The layers of detail on a realistic model couldn't be pulled off easily. Every scratch and stain would have to be either vectorized from an image or drawn, never mind the gradients and opacities you'd need to apply to match it to reality. That's an extra step you could skip by just using raster. That said, you could probably make something sleek and clean to pretty good effect, as has been said before.

Diffuse textures aren't eating up all that much processing power, it's moving around polys, shaders and lighting solutions.

Well, the way I imagine it it shouldn't be that hard to create that a texture, if the editor is good. Maybe not create the whole body texture from scratch (in Photoshop or something), but use a skin editor (which would be part of a character editor) to set ALL kinds of things.

Starting from base skin color, setting areas of darker/lighter teint (using vectors as well), continuing to "advanced" skin features like freckles, scars, hair density, wrinkles, zits, whatever else you can think of. After that pimp out the character with tattoos, brandings, scars, piercings, whatever...

After finishing the customization ONE whole body texture would be rendered (maybe when loading a level). In network play of course only the position/scaling information would be sent. I am thinking of an editor that appeals to newcomers, but is extremely powerful in terms of possibilities as well.

BTW: What about "dynamic texture resolutions"? The closer the character is to the camera, the higher the resolution. (Maybe not only textures but models and physics as well. Of course only matters in an mmo game.)

What are diffuse textures?

SeriousMoh wrote: BTW: What about "dynamic texture resolutions"? The closer the character is to the camera, the higher the resolution. (Maybe not only textures but models and physics as well. Of course only matters in an mmo game.)

Mipmapping? That's not a bad use for vectors, but at the distances where that comes into play the loss of visual fidelity isn't usually an issue, it imitates life. That blob on the horizon doesn't need any more than the barest detail, and spending cycles scaling a vector seems a waste. Generally you can get all the detail you'll ever need in a game today with a 1024 and fake the rest with normals and specularity.

SeriousMoh wrote: What are diffuse textures?

Diffuse textures are the base colors on a model. It goes by a couple of names depending on the engine in play but I'm most familiar with Maya 3dsMax and UE3, who call it a diffuse texture.