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How do have a high rez image from far away?

Sabane Talamasca
Registered User
Join date: 25 Sep 2005
Posts: 56
11-28-2005 08:22
What acually determines how far back you can see an image is detailed?

I have two floor surfaces a 256x256 and a huge one 1024x1024 or something close to that. When i zoom up to the 256 it looks slightly washy but soon as i zoom farther out it looks clearer. Now with the large one it seems opposite..clearer close, midway but further it seems washier. Also when i look at the very large file from an angle it looks so washed out i can barely make it out.


How can i get the best of both worlds?
Geminel Aridian
Registered User
Join date: 12 Nov 2005
Posts: 11
11-28-2005 10:14
512x512? *shrug* my best guess
AJ DaSilva
woz ere
Join date: 15 Jun 2005
Posts: 1,993
11-28-2005 12:38
Turning on anisotropic filtering (preferences>graphics) improves the way textures look at an angle.

You could try adding a slight blur to the texture and see if that helps. Only advice I can give on texture size is to pick the one nearest the size it will most often be seen on the screen.
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Chosen Few
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Join date: 16 Jan 2004
Posts: 7,496
11-28-2005 12:49
To eliminate distortions at distance and at angles, turn on anisotropic filtering. That's what it's for. Just be prepared for a big hit in your FPS. Mainly I just turn it on when I'm taking a picture, and then I turn it off again.

As for small textures looking blurred from close up, consider that if you're running SL at 1024x768, which most people are, that when you view a 256x256 at full screen size, you're seeing it at 4 times its actual size. The very small amount of blur you do see is a testament to one of SL's greatest talents, which is its ability to blow up small textures and still have them look great. SL is better at this than pretty much any other program I've ever seen.

I'll take this opportunity to preach once again about the importance of using small textures. The single biggest reason SL is so rediculously slow is due to poor texture management from users. The average mall, for example, contains gigabytes worth of textures, while the average video card can only process in the megabytes, so the cards just choke under the pressure, and your FPS drops to near nothing. People do stupid things like put a 1024x1024 on a 1-meter sign when a 64x64 would have worked just fine. Every time someone does that, they're consuming 256 times (yes, 256 TIMES!) as much of your precious video memory as they should. Multiply that by the hundreds of signs in the mall, and it's easy to see why malls are lag city. For all our sakes, keep your textures as small as you possibly can.

I always say a good rule of thumb is to keep about 3/4 of your textures at 256x256 or smaller, about 20% at 512x512, and about 5% at 1024x1024. There's almost never a reason you need to go bigger than 256. It's more than enough for plenty of detail, assuming your textures are well made. Consider that most modern video games use 256x256 for almost everything, and they look great. 512's should be used only on occasions when 256 really can't cut it, which isn't often. 1024's should be so rare that finding one should be like getting struck by lightning.
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Blaze Columbia
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Join date: 21 Oct 2005
Posts: 280
11-28-2005 13:09
What about clothing though?

There is a noticeable difference between 512x512 and 1024x1024, but everywhere I've seen says use 512x512 for clothes. I loose a lot of detail scaling down to 512x512. And no matter how great SL's graphics engine is, you won't get that detail back.

So, what's the general rule on clothing? Does SL limit clothing too?



I do use small sizes on stuff that doesn't need the big sizes, but I like having detail showing, too.
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Chosen Few
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Join date: 16 Jan 2004
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11-28-2005 13:45
Always use 512x512 for clothing. Avatars are the single hardest thing for the rendering enging to deal with. Every time you use a 1024x1024 instead of a 512x512, you're quadroupling the load. Do that on a shirt and a pair of pants, and youve just made it 8 times harder on everyone's video card. Do it on a skin and you've made it 12 times harder. Do it on a full set of jacket, shirt, undershirt, pants, underpants, skin, eyes, and hair, and you've now made it 44 times harder than it should be. Put a few avs with 1024's in the same area, and ouch.

Stick with 512. There's more than enough room there for high detail. Sure you can get a little more with 1024, but the tradeoff in performance is absolutely not worth it.
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Blaze Columbia
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Join date: 21 Oct 2005
Posts: 280
11-29-2005 12:46
I totally understand that Chosen, but hey, quality sells!!!

So, I wonder how many designers use the 1024x1024 textures for their clothes, or for certain articles of clothing. If LL hasn't set a limit, then why not use it when you need it? Quite honestly I'm tempted to 'sneak' a 1024x1024 texture in there here and there when i want more detail.

It may take longer to load, but you'll sure look good when it does!

:)
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AJ DaSilva
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Join date: 15 Jun 2005
Posts: 1,993
11-29-2005 12:49
It's not really the longer time it takes to load that's the problem, it's the amount it slows down the client once it has.
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Torley Linden
Enlightenment!
Join date: 15 Sep 2004
Posts: 16,530
11-29-2005 13:06
From: Blaze Columbia
I totally understand that Chosen, but hey, quality sells!!!

So, I wonder how many designers use the 1024x1024 textures for their clothes, or for certain articles of clothing. If LL hasn't set a limit, then why not use it when you need it? Quite honestly I'm tempted to 'sneak' a 1024x1024 texture in there here and there when i want more detail.

It may take longer to load, but you'll sure look good when it does!

:)


The existing problem is no matter how high resolution gets, it's still zooming into a flat picture. I've seen so many awesome 1024x1024 vendor pics that ended up in really crappy clothes when displayed on a 3D context. I've found that sometimes, the best way to entice me to purchase something is to see it "in the flesh" on another avatar, and I'll followup.
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Chosen Few
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11-29-2005 14:03
From: Blaze Columbia
I totally understand that Chosen, but hey, quality sells!!!

So, I wonder how many designers use the 1024x1024 textures for their clothes, or for certain articles of clothing. If LL hasn't set a limit, then why not use it when you need it? Quite honestly I'm tempted to 'sneak' a 1024x1024 texture in there here and there when i want more detail.

It may take longer to load, but you'll sure look good when it does!

:)


What AJ said.

From: AJ DaSliva
It's not really the longer time it takes to load that's the problem, it's the amount it slows down the client once it has.

Amen to that.




Please don't take offense when I say what I'm about to say, Blaze, because I know you're a good person and that don't mean any harm. Please understand I'm not aiming this at you personally. I'm speaking to everyone in general. Okay, here goes.

For one to slow down everyone else's client just so one can have a slightly sharper looking outfit is, for lack of a better term, a pretty selfish thing to do. It really doesn't take many avs onscreen wearing 1024's before things slow down to a crawl. If somebody wants to spend all their time on a deserted island somewhere all by themselves, then by all means they should feel free to abuse their texture sizes all they want. However, since SL is a community, it's only right that we each not to do things that we know will negatively impact others.

In other words, just because a thing CAN be done, does not mean it SHOULD be done. For RL analogy, my town's noise ordinance says I can make as much noise as I want up until 9 p.m., and after 9, it has to be inaudible at 1000 feet. Well, a 1000 foot radius is pretty big. Technically, I would be within my rights to sit on my porch at 3:00 in the morning and play my guitar for everyone on the block to hear. I don't mind saying I'm a pretty damned good guitarist, but that doesn't mean I'm about to go proving it while my neighbors are trying to sleep. I might have a legal right to play, but they've got a much stronger moral right to sleep.

To bring that back to the clothing texture thing, as much as I'd love to really show off my texturing skills by making my images huge, it wouldn't be moral for me to do that. Sure, technically I COULD do it and I'd be perfectly withing my rights, but I think it goes without saying that everyone else's right to enjoy SL at a reasonable framerate outweighs my right make big textures. Besides, if I do it, I've got no recourse to tell anyone else not to, and then when everyone around me does it too, and I can barely move because of it, I won't have leg to stand on to say "This is what happens when there are too many big textures around." Also, I think it's a greater testament to my ability as an artist if I can make a 512 look better than anyone else's 1024 than it would be for me to use 1024's myself.

Anyway, I wish it were possible for the system to know what a texture's intended use is so that anything meant for clothing could be automatically sized to 512. Unfortunately, SL is not psychic, and it has no way of distinguishing a shirt template from a brickwall. The best solution might be to put a checkstop in place for clothing and body parts that would prevent 1024's from being applied to them, but I don't know whether or not that's technically possible. In the meantime, the checkstop is us. We are all responsible to use proper judgment and self restraint when sizing our textures. United we must stand against the evil lag monster, or divided we shall lag.

(I would have said "divided we shall fall", but falling involves moving, and moving is what lag prevents, so we'd all just sort of linger, about to fall, but not falling for real, eternally contemplating the pain we know we're about to feel when we hit the ground, but never actually feeling it be cause we're LAGGING, so we'd all just hang there being afraid, so very afraid, because that lag monster's a real scary bastard, and man that would suck!) :eek:
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Blaze Columbia
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Join date: 21 Oct 2005
Posts: 280
11-29-2005 14:21
Chosen, thanks for point that out, and I totally understand the point about 'community standards' and each of us doing are part to make everything run better.

Funny thing is, that it seems like the 512x512 max size on clothes is a 'standard' that many people probably don't realize exists. I didn't know about it until this thread, but have kept to 512x512 because the SL templates are that size. Using Chip's templates at 1024x1024, I know I've mistakenly uploaded clothing textures at that size before and went back and resized them. But I wonder how many people don't know the 'moral standard' and simply upload 1024x1024.
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Dyne Talamasca
Noneuclidean Love Polygon
Join date: 9 Oct 2005
Posts: 436
11-30-2005 07:18
I wonder if there shouldn't be a "replace texture" upload. That is, you upload a revised texture for free (since I'm thinking the L$10 is for ongoing storage space), and it updates the texture anywhere it is used in-world (obviously you could only do this if you were the person that uploaded it in the first place).

I can see some potential for abuse there (make a product with one texture, distribute a lot of copies, then upload a "revised" texture of goatse or whatever). It'd be stupid, but there are a lot of stupid people around.

But it's that, or provide some means to manipulate textures once they are in-world (rescale, crop, etc.) As far as I know, there's not even a way to tell what resolution a texture IS aside from eyeballing the size when you open it (but I haven't actually looked for a way, so I could easily be wrong.)
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Chosen Few
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Join date: 16 Jan 2004
Posts: 7,496
11-30-2005 08:10
From: Dyne Talamasca
I wonder if there shouldn't be a "replace texture" upload. That is, you upload a revised texture for free (since I'm thinking the L$10 is for ongoing storage space), and it updates the texture anywhere it is used in-world (obviously you could only do this if you were the person that uploaded it in the first place).

Interesting idea.

The upload fee, just so you know, is not really for the storage space. It's a sink to remove money from the economy. LL acts a bit like the FED, working to keep the economy healthy, and the value of the currencey relatively stable. Sinks are one of the ways they fight inflation. They adjust them from time to time.

From: Dyne Talamasca
I can see some potential for abuse there (make a product with one texture, distribute a lot of copies, then upload a "revised" texture of goatse or whatever). It'd be stupid, but there are a lot of stupid people around.

That's the ultimate downfall of this idea. It would give content creators way too much power. I could decide I don't like you anymore and then turn that avatar you paid me a small fortune for so it's covered with naked pictures of your mom or something. Not good.

From: Dyne Talamasca
But it's that, or provide some means to manipulate textures once they are in-world (rescale, crop, etc.)

This would be awesome. I'd imagine one day they'll add some basic painting and imaging features into the client. It only makes sense. One reason so many builds are so badly textured is that anyone can build in SL right out of the box, but texturing requires 3rd party programs that not everyone has. This makes texturing a bit of a specialty field while building is open to everyone. I'd love to see it more balanced.

From: Dyne Talamasca
As far as I know, there's not even a way to tell what resolution a texture IS aside from eyeballing the size when you open it (but I haven't actually looked for a way, so I could easily be wrong.)

Actually, there is. It's a debug function. Press ctrl-alt-D to add the Debug Menu to your menu bar at the top of the screen. Then go Debug -> Texture Console (or ctrl-shift-3). A window will pop up showing info about all the textures currently in your field of view. Select an object and you'll see its texture info highlighted in yellow.


From: Blaze Columbia
Chosen, thanks for point that out, and I totally understand the point about 'community standards' and each of us doing are part to make everything run better.

Funny thing is, that it seems like the 512x512 max size on clothes is a 'standard' that many people probably don't realize exists. I didn't know about it until this thread, but have kept to 512x512 because the SL templates are that size. Using Chip's templates at 1024x1024, I know I've mistakenly uploaded clothing textures at that size before and went back and resized them. But I wonder how many people don't know the 'moral standard' and simply upload 1024x1024.

This is something I wonder about too, Blaze. It's obvious when people disregard their "part" by wearing too much bling or too much hoochie hair, but it's not so obvious when it's textures. I'd imagine it's not uncommon, unfortunately.
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Chip Midnight
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Join date: 1 May 2003
Posts: 10,231
11-30-2005 08:21
Using anything larger than 512x512 for clothing and skin textures is a complete waste. You almost never see part of an avatar at full screen so all the extra pixel data is wasted and just creates extra viewer lag with no real benefit..
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Dyne Talamasca
Noneuclidean Love Polygon
Join date: 9 Oct 2005
Posts: 436
11-30-2005 08:35
From: Chosen Few
The upload fee, just so you know, is not really for the storage space. It's a sink to remove money from the economy.


I actually knew that it served that purpose, but ... it's really late for me right now, and so my original theory for why it was there popped out automatically, as they sometimes do. :)


From: someone
but texturing requires 3rd party programs that not everyone has.


Or in my case, are just too bloody lazy to use.

I can texture, but I frequently can't be bothered. Sabane can probably attest to my complete and utter laziness, as we happen to be neighbors now. :)

Though sometimes I prefer the smooove look, as you can see below.

From: someone
Actually, there is. It's a debug function.


Bah, I should have thought of that, seeing as I have the debug menu permanently on.
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