Dark Texture Question

What do you do when you want to use a dark texture but you cant see the form undernieth? Ive considered making some patterns that I can place over the texture and "cut" it out but I dont know if I can do that. I have some wonderful textures but some are too dark and I end up not doing what I want.
I think I posted this in the wrong section. Sorry.

I'm not truly sure what you mean. Let me take a totally wild guess, though. You are making clothes in Photoshop and you are having a hard time seeing the avatar template because the fabric layer is VERY dark and the lines on the template are too faint. Right? If that's what you mean, remember that the template layers are not UNDER the fabric layer (unless you have messed up and put the fabric layer at the top of the layer stack instead of the bottom) -- they are on top. Try temporarily reducing the opacity of the fabric layer while you are working on things. That will make the fabric appear much lighter. Just don't forget to bring the opacity back to 100% again before you do a final save on your project.

If I guessed wrong and that NOT what you meant, explain a little more and we'll give it a second try.

And yes, this should have gone in the Texture Tips forum. If I didn't answer your question, try reposting it over there.

I recently came onto the thought that it ought to be possible to overbrighten textures specifically via the colour controls. At the moment the RGB values are not limited to the range of 0-255 but are actually saved as 32 bit floats. This could potentially gives us hope that there might be a way to allow breaking the limits via some smart coding in the renderer on the client to allow to overbrighten textures somehow.

I just feel that there must be an efficient way to possibly do this. If not, at least there would have been discussion and all options explored.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-10787

For example we could re-use dark textures specifically, I always thought it was strange we could only ever darken ie, subtract a colour component only. There must be a way we could circumvent this to allow RGB values between 0 - 255 - upto 511.

Nexii, I don't quite follow what your'e saying. Even if you allow for more variables than 256, you don't change the minimum and maximum. All you do is put more gradations in between. A pixel can only get so bright and so dark.

Full on is white, and full off is black. There can be no such thing as "super-white" or "super-black". You can't magically make a pixel output more light than it's physically capable of producing, nor can you somehow make it absorb more light than it naturally does when it's fully off.

If you try to "overbrighten" a texture, the most you could do with it is simply turn it pure white. It couldn't become "whiter than white" or "redder than red" or "bluer than blue" or anything like that.


Also, you seem to be misunderstanding what the in-world color setting does. You're thinking of it is "subtraction" because you believe you're seeing it "darken" colors instead of "lighten" them. That's not what's happening. It's actually a multiplier. Let me give you a quick explanation of what that means.

The simplest way to understand the math is to define the RGB values on a 0-1 scale (decimals), instead of 0-255. When you color a surface white, you're multiplying the values in each channel by 1, so the diffuse color comes out exactly the same as the source texture. And when you color a surface black, you're multiplying all values by zero, so of course, the end result is pure black. Where things get more interesting is when you work with values other than 1 and 0.

Let's start with an easy example to understand, 50% gray. When you apply a color setting of medium gray to a surface, you multiply all the color values in the texture by 0.5. The end result is an image that appears half as "bright" as it was before.

For a slightly more complicated example, let's talk about what happens when you apply a color setting of red. You're now multiplying all values in the red channel by 1, and all values in the green and blue channels by 0. So anything in the source texture that was white will now be red. Anything that was green or blue will now be black. Anything that was red will be the same as it was.

To experiment with the logic, play with multiplyer layers in Photoshop. Create a layer above your texture, set its blending mode to Multiply, and see what happens when you apply various colors to it. You'll see the effects will be very similar to what happens in SL.

That's an overly simplistic explanation, of course. In practice, it's actually a little more complicated than that (I'm not sure exactly how SL calculating the opacity of the multiplier, for example), but that's the basis for what's going on.

With that in mind, it's pretty easy to see why your idea can't really work. To "brighten" a texture in the manner you suggest, you'd have to multiply it by more than 1, which is impossible. The closest equivalent to what you're talking about would be the glow effect that we already have. And as you can see pretty easily, the more glow you apply, the whiter the image becomes. Again, there's no way to be "whiter than white" (unless perhaps you voted for McCain/Palin last month; Zing!).

Well, if you were online I could explain it visually. Otherwise I am not sure how to explain this.

Basically imagine how you can select a face on a prim, it seems rather odd you can only multiply the colours to below 1.0, than allowing to overbrighten a face to at least up to 2.0, where it would be pure white. Ok take a texture which is < 128, 128, 128 >, all gray. Imagine being able to put the colour to 1.5, that would 'artifically brighten' the texture to < 192, 192, 192 >, put colour to 0.5 and it would be 'artifically darkened' down to < 96, 96, 96 >. Of course in the end the pixel would be ultimately cut down to the 0-255 range, but it would at least allow us to artifically brighten a texture, than currently only allow us to darken their components.

Otherwise how I could explain it is via a neat mono-touch UI script I made recently for a colour picker where I at least created a pseudo effect of this.