selentic please stop running around making provoking posts in almost every model-thread. it's neither polite nor necessary to advise ignoring posts, either. for someone who basically ignores almost every single tf2-model&texture-style aspect himself, you just can't run around spreading your selfconvinced wisdom like that. you can have your opinion that it might be too large, but that's it.
i'd say valve being a ~100 year old game developer knows a fair deal of how things should/could/can be in their games and engine. they have every right and reasoning to use a 2048 for a dumptruck, or just use a 1024 for a similar object. the engine can handle it and it should be up to UGLYdumpling do decide which solution to use. he can always just downscale the texture in the end to see if he loses any details or sharpening in the texture. sometimes it's just needed or desirable that the texture looks really crisp. it's far from being unrealistic or wasteful to use a 2048² on such a huge prop in this specific game - period. sure it can be discussed, based on how a mapper uses the object in his map (far, near) and how big the prop itself actually is, but in the end it's up to UGLYdumpling, after he did proper research on comparable tf2 models and textures in style and scale. it helps a lot to examine valve's way of doing things. sometimes one may think "omg, why did they do that" but in the end most of the time you get the point.
You are so unbelievably stupid. You have no idea what you're talking about and you're sitting here spreading so much misinformation which this site is happy to gobble up because you made a pretty good tractor. For the good of everyone on this site, and my sanity, please stop.
Also I'll just stop providing facts to you at this point since you find them so provoking.
Oh, and finally, it would be wonderful if you would learn to capitalize words properly, your posts are disgusting to read.
although I can appreciate the debate as to whether or not to use 1K's or 2K's for in-game props, I didn't expect a mud slinging contest to errupt. Please stop.
2K is fine for big props, (see my ge-u25b as a convenient example) ones where the texture becomes ridiculously blurry because 1K wasn't enough.
This model is nowhere near that big, and you will gain very little, if anything by making the texture four times bigger. On the other hand you decrease performance for no reason with 2K in this case.
E: If you feel you really do need more texture resolution, 2048x1024 is an option.
Looking good.
For the texture I'd say start large so it's easy to edit (say 2048 squared) and then try scaling it down incrementally until you lose too much definition.
Out of interest could you not save a few polys on the grill at the front by baking them into a bump map from a high poly version?
Generally unless you really need to cover up mistakes you made, you do not paint at a high resolution and scale down. It's a bad habit to get into, and in tf2 the possibility for mistakes is pretty small too. After all you're dealing almost entirely with solid colours.
