Ideal Texels

Stand a metre-wide panel of the model in front of you. Texels per metre is how many pixels of texture are spread across that metre. Too few and the texture is stretched thin, going soft and blurry the moment the camera gets close. Too many and you are spending memory and load time on detail nobody will ever be near enough to see.

This is not the same as Paint Texel Density, which shows you how the model compares to itself. Ideal Texels gives an absolute answer, measured against a number you chose, so it can tell you the whole model is wrong rather than only which parts differ from the rest.

Reading the colors

Green is on target. Each polygon is placed by how many doublings it sits from that target, so the bands stay meaningful whatever number you pick.

• Warm colors, yellow to red, are stretched. Fewer texels than you asked for, so the surface will look soft.
• Cool colors, blue to purple, are wasteful. More texels than the surface needs, which costs memory and steals resolution from the parts that need it.
• White means the question has no answer there. No UV area, or no paint canvas on that mesh. It is usually the same geometry Mesh Diagnostics reports as broken.

Picking a target

There is no single right number, but there are usual ones: about 256 for stylised or older games, 512 for the modern default, 1024 for hero assets such as weapons and faces and anything the camera lingers on, and 2048 for a surface the camera is right up against. They are powers of two because texture sizes are, which is why the slider snaps to 256s the moment you drag off it.

What matters more than the exact figure is that the whole model uses the same figure. Mismatched density is what makes one wall look crisp and the wall beside it look muddy.

Why you have to measure the scale first

A world unit is a metre only by agreement, and an imported FBX or OBJ never got the memo. Exporters ship centimetres, inches, and whatever the modeller happened to type, so the same character arrives 1, 100, or 39.37 units tall depending on which tool made it.

That does not matter for a relative density view, because scaling a model scales every triangle equally and the picture never changes. It matters enormously here, because the answer is absolute. At 100x scale a perfectly good model reads as a hundredth of the texels it should have: an alarming red model and a completely false alarm. So the scale is measured against the model on screen rather than guessed from the file.

Measuring the scale never resizes your model. It is a number the maths uses. Nothing in the scene moves.

How to use it

1. Press the ruler button. A yellow rule appears, and it stands for exactly one metre.
2. Drag either end until the rule spans a metre of something you know the size of: a doorway, a step, the model's own height. Drag the middle to move it without changing its length.
3. Watch the Scale number. If it settles near 1, the model was already correctly sized. Near 100 means it was exported in centimetres, near 39.4 means inches.
4. Set Ideal Texels to the number your project targets.
5. Press Analyze.

The rule redraws itself as you zoom, so it always stays one metre against the model. Zooming after you measure does not spoil the measurement.

What the numbers mean

The scan reports the range it measured and an average. That average is weighted by world area, not by triangle count, because a plain triangle average describes how the mesh was tessellated rather than how it looks: ten thousand tiny triangles in one bolt head would outvote the whole hull. The area-weighted figure answers "what does a square metre of this model get", which is the same question the target is written in.

Polygons too small to measure are counted separately and skipped rather than guessed at.