Texture size and performance

There are two major considerations for dealing with texture maps in Blacksmith3D - Suite, Morph or Paint

1. Texture dimensions will be rounded to a power of 2. This means that the width and height of the texture must be like 256x256, 512x512, 1024x512, etc. This is a limitation of the OpenGL library. Fortunately, you do not have to resize the maps manually, as Blacksmith3D will take care of that for you. 

2. For the best performance possible, OpenGL will attempt to load the textures into video RAM. If you do not have enough video RAM to accommodate the textures in your project, you will no doubt experience a slowdown. This slowdown will be most apparent when you are painting textures. You have two remedies to this problem (if you encounter it). You can 

a) Decrease the Maximum Texture Size as seen below.  It will automatically shrink large texture maps as they are imported. Changing this value after a map has been loaded will have no effect.

b) Invest in a new video card, which has more video RAM. This option may be necessary if you wish to paint very high resolution texture maps. If you are buying a new video card for using Blacksmith3D, then you may consider buying it from store that has a satisfaction guaranteed policy, so you can return it if it is not compatible (see the OpenGL page for a discussion about compatibility).

3. Texture sizes can be managed by setting the Minimum, Default and Maximum Texture Size, found in the General Options window.