So long story short, I followed the advice of some people on this forum, and started using Unreal Engine 4 again last year after hitting the ceiling in Unity 5 one too many times again, and lo and behold, I kinda liked the expierience better this time... Blueprint is still not my cup of tea, but epic has made huge strides in many areas between 4.8 and 4.16, I was impressed. But that is fodder for a whole different topic, after I get a little bit more exposure to the C++ part of UE4 (which thankfully I have found more documentation on this time).

In this topic I just wanted to ask the Unreal users, if somebody knows of an easy(-ish) way to compare the Texel density between two objects in the editor. Trying to eyball it is quite hard in Unreal given how good the texture filtering works even in the editor.

I have seen no view mode or similar that would visualize the actual texel density of the objects in the scene, which is what I am after.

If its unsure what I want, I want to put mesh A next to mesh B, and see how big the texture pixels are in comparison. To be able to standardize on a common texture resolution, and see which mesh needs a higher, or can have a lower resolution texture.

The only Idea I have at the moment would be to work with a separate material with a checkerboard texture. That might work. though it is kind of a hassle, needing multiple checkerboard textures for different resolutions, OR having to come up with a good material function to achieve it, and then needing to swap materials every time I want to compare. Maybe someon here has a better solution? Maybe I missed something obvious again and are in for a "Doh!" moment ?

1 hour ago, Gian-Reto said:

I have seen no view mode or similar that would visualize the actual texel density of the objects in the scene, which is what I am after.

Since texel density is just a texture there is no visualizer for it; each material decides the texel density based on the the largest texture.

That said I have seen some people using the Shadow Map Density view mode as a quick way to eyeball texel density. It's not perfect because shadow maps are often smaller and have 25% the time Unique UV maps.

1 hour ago, Gian-Reto said:

The only Idea I have at the moment would be to work with a separate material with a checkerboard texture.

Yup that is what most of us use. Every 3D artist I know has a set of Prototype textures that they made them self for this. Remember to indicate where the textures tile, some artist keep it perfect and then can't see where the texture ends.

There are free ones online. The default Unreal material is suppose to be the same idea but the color makes it too dull for this.

You could make a adaptive one using the material editor. You would use world scale node with some tiling textures. 

There are free prototype texture sets on the web, but it only takes a hour to make a personal set that works for you.

Personally I like make new ones for most models. This is one from where I worked on a dark warehouse scene, that the player could only look into.

The red and green is where the texture doesn't tile, so I could get dirt and dust on the boxes.

The texture had to tile so we could just use one 512 for all the boxes like this:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/Types/Textures/Streaming/Building/

There are a bunch of view modes for viewing texel density here for streaming.

Guys, thanks a lot for your responses.

I have seen the Texture streaming viewmode but wasn't sure it could actually be used for non-streaming texture analysis.... I might need to read up on it.

But as scouting ninja suggests, I guess I just need to get my hand on some checkerboard textures and create some basic materials... a little bit more work, but meh... maybe modern game engines just spoil us too much with all the other useful tools

This can be done using mipmaps. Not sure if there's anything built into Unreal for this, but the idea is rather simple: http://aras-p.info/blog/2011/05/03/a-way-to-visualize-mip-levels/