Hey all. So my wife works as the head of marketing for a local lumber mill and they have been approached by Light Beans to have some unique products they manufacture turned into high quality textures available through the Light Beans extension. I volunteered to try the extension out and the materials look GREAT! Then I checked my file size and was surprised by 44MB. So I removed the 3 textures from Light Beans that were in the model (13 textures total) and the file dropped to 2.5MB.
So my questions for you are: At 14MB per swatch would anyone in Architecture use these or is that too big a file size to be practical? and: How much difference does that level of photographic detail make in Pro level renders, like how much is too much?
For me it’s a full stop no thanks I’ll find something lighter that works, but I just do design build services for my decking company. I don’t use a photorealistic render-er either, SketchUp’s look is fine for communicating with my clients.
It’s a complicated topic. Many people assume that more resolution is always better, but there are practical considerations such as file size and render performance
In professional film and game production, there are long-established rules of thumb for texture density based on distance to the camera. Around 1024 px per metre is generally considered quite high. On top of that, many renderers automatically reduce effective texture density anyway.
Many texture libraries advertise very high resolutions — for example 4K textures intended to cover just 30 cm — which sounds impressive but is often unnecessary in practice. That level of density far exceeds what most renderers, view distances, or target outputs can actually make use of.
For example, SketchUp converts textures to 1024 px if the source file is larger, so using a 4096 px texture provides no benefit there. Renderers like V-Ray and Enscape also automatically downscale textures based on camera distance using mip-mapping.
My usual approach is to start with a 1K texture. If, during production and scene selection, a material appears blurry, I’ll replace it with a higher-resolution version or adjust the texture to achieve the desired look. Often, though, resolution alone isn’t the real issue. Some materials simply don’t read well at a distance regardless of texture size, and require a different material construction altogether.
Car paint is a good example of this — many renderers include a dedicated car-paint shader specifically to ensure it behaves correctly at a distance, rather than relying on raw texture resolution alone.
I would not want all of my textures to be large - with anything SketchUp, you kind of need to pick and choose detail for what’s important to your scope. Custom finishes for an interior design project = high resolution - concrete sidewalk or adjacent building, low res. Styles, poly count and other visual settings all together affect SketchUp performance and user experience. You gotta find that sweet spot.
Thanks KyleB! The Light Beans guys are assembling a texture catalogue of real world products, like what the 3D Warehouse started a while back. I like really like the idea but am skeptical of the conversion rate from downloaded texture to product sale. I suppose it would be nice if there were high and low res options depending on the modellers needs.
There is a great extension called Material Resizer than can quickly edit resolution sizes in bulk if the file sizes get to big and SketchUp performance struggles.
I tested material resizer with PBR materials. It only resizes the albedo material. I’ve asked the graphics team to think about a way to resize other maps at the same time.
For now I think you would need to edit the different other map images to match the size of the smaller albedo image.
Thanks Dave, more ways to improve my file size are always appreciated. My question was more pointed at if you think the architectural CAD community in general would be interested in texture files of this size, or is it excessive for most architectural presentation applications?