So lately I've been noticing a lot of people using trim-sheets & they're essentially looking around Artstation for examples , finding good visuals results and replicating that without much thought if what they are doing, is the right thing for their use-case.

So since I don't think I need to explain what trim-sheets are in this blog-post I thought it'd be best to jump straight into the details but for the sake of trying to minimize the size of this article:

Trim-sheets are a texturing technique that generally has either horizontal or vertical tiling areas. It sometimes mixes in quadrant pieces or areas meant for decals into the texture.

I just want to highlight that I don't mean to point anybody out here for shaming purposes nor bash any game, this is for learning purposes only and what you should consider when making trim-sheets or game-art in general. All productions have these issues, there are just very few resources actually talking about it.

Let's talk about this particular trimsheet layout:

The Good:

• High quality trim-sheet, large shapes allow for good visual representation & detail
• Tiling on the horizontal and has sections meant for the ends of wooden beams
• 45-degree normal that fakes depth on a flat surface & when used right can fake bevels on 90 degree mesh edges.

The Bad:

All trims are the same size.

• This indicates that there is little to no thought put into Texel Density. Ie these trims might be scaled freely in the scene.
• This is "generally" fine on high-end platforms where you can barely tell the different in texture resolution.
• This however is a huge issue on lower end platforms or in a situation where you set the Texture Resolution in the game and the game starts halfing (or more) the texture resolution. It means that everything will start looking very uneven in terms of Texel Density.
• This goes doubly for stylized games sometimes which might be planning a Switch Port or the like where you basically are forced to half or use a quarter of the texture resolution.