Can ultra-low-res textures cause problems while rendering?

Question

This is a strange question, so comment if it's unclear.

I'm making a low-poly piece of art, where many of my objects will have only a single flat color (a cube that's all green, for example).

It seems that I should be able to use a very small texture for each object (the green cube could use just a single green pixel as its texture, for example).

I want to know if this will cause any problems. Should I use 16x16 or 32x32 textures, even though they provide more resolution than I actually need?

I am using the Blender internal render engine, though I also plan to export to Unity for a game project.

What render engine are you using? I don't see any way it could cause problems for Cycles. But if you have something that is all one color why do you even need a texture for it? — PGmath, Dec 16 '15 at 00:13
A lot of the objects are made by merging several single-color objects together into one, multi-color object. Can I do that without textures? — Somatic, Dec 16 '15 at 00:14
Possible duplicate of How can I keep low resolution textures pixelated? — J Sargent, Dec 16 '15 at 01:13
@HATMAN I don't see how that's a duplicate. That's talking about color interpolation on scaled up low res textures, this is asking if there are problems with using very small textures. — PGmath, Dec 16 '15 at 01:39

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 10 '20 at 12:57

5

Yes, having a low res texture can cause issues, but they can be prevented. Here is an example:

This is the texture I will be using in the example, which is 16x16 pixels:

If we import this into Blender we notice that the pixels are all smoothed and the detail is completely lost. This is because the interpolation is set to Linear, which will fade from the color of one vertex to the next using a linear gradient:

Switching this to Closest brings back all the detail and makes the image remain sharp:

In your particular example, as long as this is enabled, you can go down to a 1 pixel size without any issues.

edited Jun 10 '20 at 12:57

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answered Dec 16 '15 at 01:39

J Sargent

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I don't think you experience this effect if the texture is a solid color. – PGmath Dec 16 '15 at 01:41
@PGmath I was under the impression they wanted to use *1* texture to define all the colors – J Sargent Dec 16 '15 at 01:42

Can ultra-low-res textures cause problems while rendering?

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