What's the difference between 1024x512 v 512x512 on head textures?
Also what do you think is the best template for 1024x512 aswell

512x512 is a square 1024x512 is more elongated sideways and it allows for more detail to be added onto the texture and with a 512x512 the texture is stretched a bit I think and the 1024x612 gives better results in general

Ok, thank you.

So basically, if I put say a circle or other shape on a 512x512, it would come out appearing stretched, but if it was 1024x512 it would show as a proper circle like as it was originally drawn?

Yes basically will show a circle.

If you look at the texture you can see that from top to bottom of the texture is from top to bottom of the sphere, only 180 degrees. If you look at the left to right of the texture you can see that it goes from the back of the sphere all the way around 360 degrees to the back again.

Thus we know that horizontally the texture actually covers twice as much distance as it does vertically. Does this make sense to you?

So if you were to draw a texture on 512x512 then the horizontal would be stretched to twice it's width. If you draw a circle on 512x512 it becomes a wide oval, to compensate artists have to halve the width of things they draw.

This is awkward, so many find it easier to double the width while they are working, so if they draw a circle on the texture it appears as a circle on the head in game. Then they just have to scale the width to 50% down to 512x512 when they are done.

Also please note that this only applies to the middle section of the head, as at the top and bottom it's very distorted no matter what, if you draw a circle near the top or bottom it won't be a circle!

Here's an example head texture that has a few circles, as you can see they look squashed, but when stretched to double the width they will be round:


Here is another, of a human head, you can see the face looks long, but when ingame it will look normally proportioned:


Here's an example of the opposite where I projected an image onto the sphere then baked the texture map


This question comes up a lot, so hopefully I could illustrate it well once and for all...

theres no reason to convert it back to 512x512.

The reason you might want to convert it is for better filtering, you can choose bicubic, bilinear, nearest neighbour, or whatever other settings your program has, or you can use other shit to get what you desire.

I wouldn't trust the automatic filtering, I dunno if it's nearest neighbour of what, but I wouldn't trust it just because you can't control it.