How High is Too High?

I've noticed a trend lately, at least in a certain marketplace, a certain progression in the size of textures used for both character skins and Clothing items - (this is in the Poser universe, for those who need clarity) While it's always good to know the size of the textures involved, it seems to have become a kind of competition, as if Bigger is Better, and "mine are bigger", more detailed, thus better than the average. The funny thing is, using clothing textures as an example, when the average texture size was 1024x1024, suddenly we started getting merchants displaying "2000x2000!" - bigger and better. Rather quickly (at least it seemed quick to me) this progressed to 3000x3000!. That one lasted awhile it seems - but now the "going rate" seems to have upped to 4000x4000.

Aren't we getting a little carried away here, folks?  I mean, sure, 4000x4000 is a lot of room to put detail - but when it compacts down into the actual Poser dress or outfit, just how visible is that detail? HOw close do you think people are going to be in making their renders. And how big will these renders be?

Yes, I know - prints are better at 300 dpi, so you need a big render to make a good print, and the higher the resolution on the clothing items, etc, the better it will look.

But - is it really necessary to go so high? What does this do to our machines, our programs? Even if you are importing these characters and textures into a more powerful program for rendering, it seems it wouldn't take a whole lot of these textures to bog down the rendering speed, even the capacity of the rendering program. Oh sure, such programs are improving - but how fast? And how many of us have the funds to upgrade our computers and buy these new programs that are necessary for such high quality renders?

I'm a hobbyist. I like my art to be fun, enjoyable, maybe say something, maybe not. I want it to be accessible and easily rendered. The 4000x4000 textures are beautiful in most cases - but rather useless if my machine gets bogged down or Poser tells me I've got too much to render.

As a creator, vendor of clothing textures, I usually go by the templates that come with the clothing item - but even those seem to be increasing in size. Okay, so i can maybe handle a 3000x3000 if it's for a character texture - but I personally prefer the clothing textures I make to be smaller. Does that make my texture sets less desirable? So be it. I'm not in this to compete, I'm doing it for the pleasure - and I don't care for the idea of texture sets being judged by the size of their templates.

I'm just wondering where it will stop? I'm thinking perhaps the 4000x4000 may be the cap, the limit. I know I prefer smaller textures and if I see that all of the textures for an outfit are that size, well, I'm likely not to buy it no matter how beautiful it is - because I like my renders to render in a reasonable amount of time, and I like being able to manipulate characters and objects in the scene without the program slowing down to a crawl.

Yes, I do know that you can set the maximum texture size in Poser so that even if the actual textures are larger, it won't go beyond your limit. But in that case, whats the point?

I'm watching with interest. Either the next round will be 5000x5000, or, perhaps some will begin to realize that bigger is not always better, and we'll start seeing it move back and stabilize at 3000 or even 2000 (well, I doubt that, but maybe 3000).

Meanwhile, I'll just continue making mine as i please - and hope that the templates come in reasonable sizes.

Have a great weekend,
judee