hey guys im having trouble texturing and i need your help… im working with wind walker on texturing some of his models and i have to come up with a 256 x 256 texture for him. there is alot of different way to texture a low poly model but im having trouble getting it to show detail… i now have a 2048 x 2048 uv map that im using for the texture and once finished i need to resize it to 256 x 256 but once i change the size down all i get is a blurry texture… is there any way to fix this. its for a game and the character is balrog, if your wondering. thanks for any help available.
hi - i am helping wind walker also. may be you can try to shrink in steps, first half size, then sharpen with photoshop, then again half size, sharpen, and another half size.
well that was a great idea however it come up short… anything else.
What is a "wind walker " ?
Pilou
It is this awesome person who can actually walk on wind 
Ho It’s you !
Very poetic 
I have known you brother Johnny
Pilou
Hey Dr
I’m not into low-poly game models but my brother is and uses Max, so here’s his take on it (some NWN models of his 512 textures - the screen renders are at 800 but the in-game shots are at 512 - at 256 there should be little difference from the 512).
Reducing from 2048 to 256 is going to cause a lot of detail loss. As well as decreasing the quality of the texture you will be spending time on detail that really won’t be seen on the final model.
A technique my brother generally uses is to paint in PS at 800-1024 then sharpen twice before reducing to 512, followed by one more sharpen set to 50-100% (to achieve this apply a sharpen then undo then go to filters menu and select the now-selectable ‘fade sharpen’ option at the top; this allows you to control the degree of the final sharpen better as otherwise the sharpen might be too strong) and resize to 256.
You can use image adjustments (curves, levels, brightness and contrast) sparingly to help define detail.
You can also scale the UV map up where detail is required and scale down other areas that won’t be seen (bottom of feet etc.).
It doesn’t sound as if there is a one stop fix to make good textures for low-poly models, but I hope this info helps a little.
thanks guys for all your help… ill try anything… thanks bonecradle… youve been a really big help… the project will involve zbrush,and photoshop and will be showing here at a later date in its animation form.