GDC 2025 Session Viewer
Advanced Graphics Summit: Revolutionizing Texture Pipelines: EA's Journey with Texture Sets
Martin Palko (Lead Technical Artist, Electronic Arts (SEED))
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Summits Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Programming
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: Intermediate
Art workflows have become increasingly complex, and many areas of the production pipeline have not kept pace. Textures are a prime example, where the days of a single image applied to geometry are well over. We now have intertwined surface maps packed in various channels of multiple textures, causing headaches for all involved. EA Motive and SEED have decided to tackle this problem head-on and will present their learnings developing "Texture Sets" for Dead Space, Iron Man, and more. Texture Sets is a modern rethink of the texture pipeline, bundling sets of related textures together into a single asset, and taking a data-driven and extensible approach to texture authoring, processing, and sampling.
Takeaway
Attendees will follow the development process of Texture Sets at EA, and will hear about the problems we faced and the learnings that happened along the way. They will leave understanding not only how Texture Sets works, but how we arrived at the current implementation.
Intended Audience
This talk is intended for artists and programmers of all experience levels who have a solid understanding of content creation pipelines, and/or the technology that drives them.
