Part 2: what targets to aim for, how LODs change the picture, and how to automate the check.
In Practice
There are no universal targets, but the numbers that come up consistently across the industry follow camera distance:
Each step roughly halves as the camera gets further from the asset - which tracks with how mip levels work. A first-person weapon can fill 40% of the screen; a crate in a third-person game rarely does.
These are per-category baselines, not absolutes. A AAA first-person game might push hero weapons to 20+ px/cm while background architecture sits at 5. An open-world title might cap everything at 5 purely for memory budget, regardless of perspective. The right number is the one that fits your project's constraints - these are just a starting point for setting your validation range.
Validation
The formula from Part 1 is most useful when you run it across an entire asset set rather than checking meshes one at a time. The goal is a pipeline pass that computes TD for every asset and flags anything outside your target range.
In practice this means defining a minimum and maximum threshold per asset category - for example, props in a third-person game might target 4.5-6.0 px/cm, with anything below flagged as too low-resolution and anything above flagged as wasting memory budget. The script compares each result against those bounds and outputs a report or fails the build step.
This catches two common problems: artists who unwrap efficiently but use the wrong texture resolution, and assets that were authored for a different project or camera distance and pulled in without a rescale. A single number per asset makes both of those immediately visible.
Level of Detail
TD requirements relax as LOD level increases, because the asset is further from the camera and occupies fewer screen pixels. The same logic that sets your L0 target also tells you how aggressively you can drop at each subsequent level - if your L0 target is 5.12 px/cm and each LOD step roughly doubles the draw distance, you can halve the TD at each step. L1 at 2.56 px/cm, L2 at 1.28 px/cm, and so on, until the geometry is simple enough that the texture is no longer the limiting factor.
In practice this means your validation thresholds should be per-LOD, not per-asset. Flagging an L2 mesh for low texel density against an L0 threshold will produce false positives on every asset. Set a target range for each LOD level separately.
For very distant LODs, a reprojection or distant-LOD bake is often more practical than trying to maintain a coherent UV layout - at that distance the asset is gestural anyway, and a flat projection onto a small atlas tile is faster to author and cheaper to render than a properly unwrapped mesh.
© 2026 Stefan Groenewoud - All views are my own, not those of my employer.