To reduce the size of a scene, Shapespark automatically downscales and compresses textures to smaller formats that can be efficiently handled by graphics cards. The downscaling of textures is based on the area that a single repetition of the texture occupies in 3D space. For example, a texture that covers a large carpet will have a higher final resolution than a texture that covers a small towel.
Some key textures in the scene may benefit from disabling the automatic downscaling or compression, at the cost of a larger scene size. For example, an important painting in a 3D gallery may appear better if the resolution of the texture is not reduced. Textures with sharp text may become blurry as a result of GPU compression. In rare cases, compression may cause visible shift in the colors of the final texture.
Downscaling and compression can be disabled in the Materials tab. Each texture has a gear icon that opens a menu with two options:
- GPU compressed formats - if disabled, the texture is not converted to compressed formats supported by graphics cards, but it is used in its original format (PNG or JPG). Note that JPG format is not supported by graphic cards, so such textures are decompressed before they are loaded into GPU memory. JPG format is small for disk storage and network transfer, but uses the same amount of GPU memory as uncompressed PNG format.
- Auto scale resolution - if disabled, the texture resolution is not automatically reduced based on the area a single repetition of the texture occupies in 3D space.