suggested sizes of texture files?

What are the suggested sizes of texture files for use of walls, object and clothing textures when uploading it the game?
A friend suggested I looked to see a specific posters recommendations but I can't find the post.
Someone told me to use 1024x1024 but another friend said that was way too big.

1024 X 1024 is WAY too big, thank you whoever the second friend was.

There isn't an absolute number, but as small as possible. Your textures need to be a power of 2 on each side (but not necessarily square). What that 'as small as possible' is becomes more or less impossible to predict.

For a totally plain texture, magnolia interior walls to choose a childhood trauma of mine, you can probably do 64 X 64 or smaller. It's just a block of colour after all.

For a weathered stone wall with plants growing on it you'd probably want 256 X 256, maybe bigger, although if you're not building with square walls, something like 512 X 256 might well work nicely because you'd be looking at much more detail in the texture.

It's basically about the level of detail. Your finest line has to be 1 pixel wide after all, sometimes for proportion 2 pixels if the next thickest is 3.

As a good general rule most people work bigger and shrink down. For walls I'm less sure... I find I paint 1 pixel wide detail on it regardless of the size.

Try a few at around 1024 X 1024, 256 X 256 and 64 X 64 and see what they look like would be my suggestion, as experiments. Bear in mind although transmission is a nicely packaged small file, your video card (and everyone elses) has to expand and draw it. A 1024 X 1024 chews 16X more vRAM than a 256 X 256, which in turn is 16X more than a 64 X 64. Make your textures as small as possible so your (and everyone else's) video cards don't have to do too much work.

I'm finding it hard to think of a reason for a wall in 1024 X 1024 detail, but if you really, really need you can use it. Just remember each one of those you can see chews 3-4 MB of your vRAM. How much have you got? How about everyone else? SL in theory runs on a computer with a 16MB graphics card - is your wall *that* important?

You should paint in no smaller a size than 1024x1024, but for uploading purposes you should scale your image downward to 512x512. Avatar textures look fine at this size. Smaller items, or items that will only be seen from a distance, can use even smaller image maps.

It is important to try to keep to image sizes measured as powers of two. This is what OpenGL cards expect. While you can upload any size image you want, SL will resize your image dimensions each to some power of two anyway, so you might as well do it yourself so you know what's going to happen to your texture.

Face and clothing textures must be square, or they will not map correctly. Unlike images on prim faces, you cannot scale the texture on skin or clothing along one axis to adjust its appearance, so it has to be square to start with.

Image maps may be very tall but narrow, or very wide but short. It makes no difference as long as each measurement is a power of two. Avatar maps are the exception, and again, must be square in order to work.

Each side of a texture can be any of the following dimensions, in pixels: 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 or 1024. Any other size WILL get re-scaled to one of those values in each direction when you upload, and SL is certain to do a worse job of scaling the picture than your graphics application can do. ALL clothing textures and skin textures (tattoo layer) should be imported at 512 x 512, because they WILL get re-scaled to that one size by the avatar texture 'baking process'.

So a small color chip or a texture for fine, even sand might be as small as 32x32. Something that only needs to be long and thin, like a texture for a chain or rope, might be 32 x 256. Most of my final textures are 256 x 256, 256 x 512, 512 x 256, or 512 x 512, depending on what I am doing, and how much detail I need.

The only time I'll usually do 1024 in any direction is when I am doing a building texture for a huge wall that you're going to need to see detail on, close up. And then it will most likely be 1024 wide by 512 high.

The larger the texture, the longer it takes SL to deal with it. Small is good. Design textures at a high level of detail, and scale them smaller for import. I work at 2048 x 2048 for a lot of my master images. When you scale it down, the resulting anti-aliased image looks more detailed than anything you could draw at exact size.

overall the smaller the better

it doesnt really effect transfer or fetch times ... but when it hits someones computer with litterly hundereds to thousands of other textures, the smaller image size helps out on fps (frames per second of animation you get to see), fuzzys and so on

that only effects the image you send to SL, i agree with working in higher resolutions, and scaling down for some applications

Thanks for all who responded now if I only I had intelligence to understand.
Some of my graphics like when taking my artwork or the custom babyroom I did has toys on shelf, sponge paint and flowers that I hand painted I figured up to now the bigger the page the better quality of the graphics. I figured also the textures I created that were high detail ornate silks or gold had lot of high detailed images and textures would appear better quality image that why I went so high I assumed it was for the quality of the image I was told by my first sl friend to do my artwork textures that size versus 512x512.
I am bit confused about this subject so I thought I ask.
I just created over 20 graphics spent tons uploading, not counting the error messages for files that I uploaded that had error glitches and said it was 0x0. I made my first 500L I didn't have to pay for then lost most of it with uploading especially if I can't use the images in future then so what should I do in future with these images, what will happen iif they are 1024 x1024? what is big deal?
Is it that others will only see fuzzy images at this size or?
I am artist, I don't really understand the technical aspects of half of what you said. I am so sorry. LOL
It is probably not big deal for someone who can go buy the best of stuff that I lost the L but to me it is big deal, how I avoid this in the future?

If I were in you, I would try and keep it as simple as possible. This means two things.

1. Upload your files as 512 X512 pixels

2. Make sure they are saved as tga. Before uploading.

That’s it. Eloise and Ceera are texture experts. I don’t know Kalel or Osgeld. However all four have given you good advice on textures. When you get more experience and understand SL better you might want to reread what they have said, to get ideas on how to improve your images. I often copy & paste into a document things that I find valuable. Then I can go back and read them when I need the information.

If you up load at 512 X 512 you will have a good balance between detail and rez time (rez is the what happens when the image come into focus or a prim is created in-world). An image if 1024 X 1024 will take much longer to rez or focus on your or someone else’s computer screen. Have you ever been in an area with a lot of people? Notice the little red and yellow bars on the top right of your screen. That is your computer saying it can’t download all of the images quickly enough. That is why we get the grey images, for what seems like forever. The more textures and the LARGER they are, the longer it takes for your computer to download and display them on your screen.

You said you lost money on load errors. Make sure you upload in tga. format. If it is a basic texture like wallpaper use 24 bit compression. If it is something that has an alpha channel, such as, clothing, picket fence or chain links, use 32 bit compression.

I think you are plenty intelligent enough. Anyone who can figure out the complexity of walking, talking and flying in SL can make and save textures.

I hope this helps. Let us know if you have anymore questions.

Jen

Don't let the complexities get to you, FD. Everyone who works with textures has some problems at first. Heck, I'm sure some of the early textures that I uploaded, ones I still use today, are not at the "best" resolution, knowing what I do now, after a year of working with SL textures. Those textures all still work, they just don't work as well as I might get them to if I re-did them today.

Detail versus efficency is always a balancing act. I made some kneeling cushions as one of my very first SL projects. Man, that texture was great! You could see every bump and ripple in the cloth, if you got close enough. Was it too much? Probably, given that most people are NOT going to look at a kneeling cushion while close enough that their character would have their nose almost touching the cloth! Will I re-do them? No, because there are hundreds of them in-world, and uploading a new texture won't fix them. The old ones will still use the old texture.

When you are on a tight budget, avoid using the "bulk upload" feature when uploading textures. If you upload one at a time, you get to look at each one BEFORE you pay money to complete the upload! If you do bulk-upload, it assumes you already checked the files and are certain they are in the right format, and ready to upload. Even then, if the file format is OK, the worst thing is usually a case where you saved something as 24-bit TGA and it was suposed to have a transparent area. So you need to re-save as 32-bit TGA and re-upload those goofs. I always double-check a large batch, before uploading them, and make sure the file format is right, and the apha masks are right, and that it's what I really want. A few days ago I uploaded 90 new textures. They all worked first try, because I checked them carefully before I started uploading.

Thank you so much for your responses. I will save this. By the way in my online game profile I put up a image of teture gold and wood wall I made in the classified and 1st life part of my profile has a digital painting i did..
I save all files as tga but I had issues with figuring this out the first week.
I understand the grey and fuzziness I see it way to often.
Most annoying thing is when my clothing textures don't rebake and go grey or white not sure how to fix them yet.
Is this because the textures were too large?

Happily clothes rebaking is starting to get better after a recent massive crash in performance, particularly with the "Missing Texture" thing.

It is still far from as good as it was before that though.

Best bet, client menu, character>rebake textures. Clicking into appearance mode and out and changing your group can sometimes help too.

Although I've seen the process description (Kelly I think it was posted it in here) and we know that clothes textures for other than 512 X 512 get internally resized (thus stressing the system a bit, unnecessarily) no one has good data about how much stress this induces and if it makes you more prone to such things I'm afraid.

3. No larger than necessary (over rides #1). If the image will be small on the screen (e.g. a t-shirt or a cat) then the texture should be small, such as 64x64. You only need 512x512 if the image will be 3 or 4 inches across on the screen.

There is another long therad on this topic. Go search for it.

Cat fur, yes

T-shirt no, No, NO!

Clothes items get baked together by layers into a composite. That image is ALWAYS 512 X 512 textures. This is achieved by internally resizing on the fly any images at other sizes, layering them together and in essence flattening the image. We don't have any control over many of those steps, but make your clothes at 512 X 512 so you can take out the resize step: It makes no difference making it smaller at upload, because it will be resized for streaming, but having to resize it makes the system work harder, and it already struggles as it is.