Sculpty Suggestion: Limit Texture Res to 64x64 to Limit the Load on the Asset Server

Hi, I hope someone from Linden Labs reads this and takes it to heart.

First, it does not appear that textures over 64x64 yield decent results for LOD reasons, so having them does not help those creating sculpties.

Secondly, if you look almost anywhere you'll see that a lot, perhaps majority, of users upload the highest resolution textures they can all the time -- this is bad for the asset server, bad for the game client, and bad for the neighbor who's trying to maximize framerate.

If this experience is to guide us, it would be that people will try to make complex and detail meshes using sculpties with high-resolution textures, and could result in a doubling of bandwidth used for textures.

An error message or such saying their sculpty texture is too big enforce now in beta before release will save a lot of grief after.

In order to do that though you'd have to have a way to differentiate between a scuplty texture and a regular texture. Since, at the moment, they're treated exactly the same and can be used interchangeably. You'd then also have to block regular textures from being used as scuplty textures.

Couldn't it just throw up an error when you choose the texture? All it has to do is look at the texture you're trying to assign and say "Hmm, this is bigger than 64 x 64" and then complain. For both assigning the texture manually and via script. It can then be applied to the texture picker to by having it restrict the choices to only valid ones if you're assigning a texture to a sculpty.

I've not had much luck trying to produce things I want yet, so I've not made much head-way in experimenting with sculpties, but 64 x 64 doesn't seem like much, especially for a big prim. It's difficult to decide what's suitable for the high-end, but I'd say 128 x 128 personally, it should allow for growth and hopefully keep an truly insane ones from being used.

What are the polygon faces limit? Does it even resist texture going more than the limit, say a 1024 texture? (yes, going over 10,000 faces would be insane, I'd think?) --Vincent Nacon 17:14, 28 April 2007 (PDT)

Vincent - regardless of texture size - the maximum tessellation of the sculpted grid is 32x32. larger images are simply down sampled. --Qarl Linden 13:25, 29 April 2007 (PDT)

I may be the first to complain about it, I think that's too small. 32 x 32 = 1024 vertexs Maybe 64x64(4096 vertexs)? Any higher than 128 would be too much. --Vincent Nacon 14:20, 29 April 2007 (PDT)

Vincent - no. 1000 verts is roughly the render weight of our heaviest prim. if we allowed more verts, we'd need to implement some kind of prim weighting mechanism to even the load, which is all around unpleasant. if you need more detail, use more prims. --Qarl Linden 15:16, 29 April 2007 (PDT)

Personally I wouldn't mind a kind of prim weighting for Sculpies. At "1 prim per 1000 verts" worth of land usage it'd be pretty well balanced IMO. As you put a higher rez texture onto the prim you can then specify how many "prims" worth of alotment you'd like to use up (the selection topping out at the maximum usage of the applied texture -or- 96x96 pixels/9000 verts (IMO 128x128 is a little too many verts at 16,000. I'd say 8000 max, but that turns into 90 pixels which isn't a teribly computer friendly number and 96 was a little better (32+64)).

Thouhts?

If you look on the estate/region dialog on the terrain tab you'll notice it requires those textures to be 512x512 or they won't accept. I think sculpties should work the same way, only be at 64x64 or 128x128. Anything higher then that will take really really long to load thats for sure.

128x128 would load quickly, yes, it's just the number of verts it makes that is the issue, hence my suggestion above.

As I understand it from reading the talk page any vertex map over 64x64 gets automatically converted to a 64x64 size before it uploads, rendering uploading anything larger than that rather pointless.

No, it uploads as whatever size, but when it gets applied to a prim the vertex map is downsampled from the supplied texture. The texture itself is still 512x512 or whatever.

a) we want zero compression on sculpties.
b) we want to maximize compatability ie restrict them to x by x

in the upload preveiw window is a sculpty preveiw, could we utilize this as a way to flag the intended use of the texture?

then the server could check it's size and alert you that compresion will be applied (if it's over bounds) or apply no compresion.

result> happy builders, happy users, happy lindens.

Given the results of Gearsawe Stonecutter's experiments in thread http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=184993 , I'd hate to see 128x128 textures made unavailable for use as sculpt textures, unless there were a way to get that kind of accuracy out of lower resolutions.

(and why is bbcode suddenly not working?)

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