Quality textures

I'm having problems getting my textures to look good on my mesh. Even though I use 200 dpi (not pixels) textures, they look chunky and blurred, especially on round objects (like a head). Maybe I should texture entities before scaling them? or use > 200? or more likely, flatten the object before texturing?

BTW, is it important to use texture sizes divisible by 2? Mine are generally 100 * 200 etc.

As you can tell I'm still learning (spelling included).

I thought that it was good practice to use textures that are a power of 2. i.e. 2,4,8,16,32,64, etc...

You may need to adjust your projection method. If you are putting a texture on a round object then sphereical mapping might work better than planar. I haven't tried much with mapping in Blitz3d so I forget whether or not Blitz3d has these mapping methods available or not. It probably does.

Yes always use textures which are square and a power of 2 in size. Blitz and/or your video card will scale them up to that size and it makes them ugly and you still use the same aound ot video ram.

Also, for a character, you can surely get away with using a 512x512 texture.

But one trick you can use if you're stuck with low res, is you can allocate a larger amount of the texture to the face and to other detailed areas than to the rest of the mesh. This requires careful texture unwrapping.

200x200 pixel maps are not very big bro, expect possiblwe tearing and blur. I would say these days minimum is 512 on anything high detail.

200 will be streched to 256 afaik, so it's a waste of Videoram. Unwrapping a Model is a serious science. Characters can be textured in a clever way. The Face would use much more Space than some other parts. This way it can look highly detailed with 512 and still pretty good with 256 Texel Textures.

Dpi has NOTHING to do with computer graphics - it's just pixels. Dpi (dots-per-inch) belongs to print world... if you have 1*1 inch sized "real-world" image that is 200 dpi, it means that it's pixel size is 200*200 pixels... but don't even think this! Just make sure that the texture image you have on your photoshop is 256*256 PIXELS (or any other 2^ size)...

Blurred look comes somewhat from the bilinear filtering, but mostly from the MipMap levels kicking in too "aggressively"... but since we can't control MipMapping in Blitz there little that can be done about it and it is also dependant of the screen res and cards drivers so there is like million things that you don't have any control over.