Texture Sizes for Unreal Engine 4

The most current iteration of Unreal Engine, UE4, supports textures that range in resolution from 1px x 1px all the way up to 8192px x 8192px. These resolutions must be a power of two, so it could be 2x2, 4x4, 64x64 etc. The reason for this is that these resolutions work better with the binary systems that a computer operates on. The modern industry standard for 3D games is 2048x2048, which is a high-resolution texture. This resolution provides in a good amount of detail on the texture, whilst not taking up too much memory, resulting in optimal performance and fidelity. A common part of designing textures is working out where you can get away with having lower textures, for example on a distant object that the player will never see up close. Having these lower textures in the right place allows you to create more detailed textured for the things that the player will see up close frequently, without going overboard on memory requirements.

A woodland camo texture I made in Photoshop, for use in UE4

UE4 supports the following file formats:

• .bmp
• .float
• .pcx
• .png
• .psd
• .tga
• .jpeg
• .exr
• .dds
• .hdr

The PNG file format was invented to replace GIF, and is used as a common file format on the internet. PNGs are smaller in file size, they support more colours than GIFs. GIFs can be animated and this is prevalent on the internet, and whilst PNGs can also be animated, (an animated PNG is an MNG) this file format is not widely supported at the moment, one of the main reasons that the GIF format still exists so popularly. JPEG images have an even smaller file size than PNGs and GIFs, however the main issue with JPEGs is that they use a compression routine that results in the quality of the image being diminished with each time the file is saved. 

My texture on an object in UE4