Texel Density & Units

What is Texel Density

Texel Density refers to the ratio between a 3D model’s surface area and the resolution of its texture map, ensuring consistent visual quality across different objects in a scene. It determines how many texture pixels (texels) are applied per unit of real-world or 3D space.

Texel Density ensures that textures maintain a uniform appearance across different assets, preventing some areas from looking sharper or blurrier than others. By balancing texture space usage, it helps avoid unnecessary pixel waste and resolution mismatches, ensuring that every part of the asset receives an appropriate level of detail.

In 3D game development, maintaining proper texel density is essential for performance optimization. It helps control texture sizes, reducing memory usage and improving rendering efficiency. By carefully managing texel density, artists can achieve both high visual fidelity and optimal resource efficiency in their projects.

Texel Density Settings

Texel Density Check Box – This checkbox enables or disables Texel Density scaling. When activated, the system adjusts UV scaling based on the specified texel density target.

• If Texel Density is toggled off Unwrella-IO will scale all UV islands to use as much texture space as possible. If the Rescale option is enabled they are still scaled to have a uniform density across the islands.

• If Texel Density is toggled on the density scaling will be adjusted to not just be uniform but to also match the chosen density instead of scaling the charts based on the available free area.

Texel Density Input – This input field determines the target texel density of the UV islands. If the Texel Density Check Box is enabled all islands are proportionally adjusted to maintain the desired texel density.

Scene Units

Unwrella-IO translates the system units of the 3d scenes to a user friendly display of measurements. This is used in combination with the texel density to allow users to work with convenient real-world measurements like “128 pixels per cm”. If the imported scene contains explicit real world units Unwrella-UI preserves them. If no units are provided Unwrella-IO uses a default of 1cm per system unit.

In either case the currently used interpretation can be adjusted through the unit scale button in the bottom right corner of the viewport.

Clicking the button opens a dialog where the scale multiplicator of the system units and the corresponding unit type can be chosen freely. The texel density option adapts to these choices.