Terrain Texture Files and Tiling

Hi,

The knowledgebase gives some basic details on the size of texture files for terrain use, and talks about tiling.

Quote:

Texture format requirements
Second Life has 4 elevation ranges, and requires a texture map for each of them. They must be 512x512, 24 bit Targa (.tga) files with no alpha channel.

Tiling textures
For obvious reasons it is important to make sure your textures tile correctly. There are a number of tutorials and instructional pages on the Internet that show how to do this. There are also a number of books available on this subject, as well as many other subjects that are useful when creating textures for use in Second Life.

Unquote

Can anyone tell me, for a standard sized sim of 256 x 256 m, how many tiles are we talking about here?

Regards

Rock

I don't know off hand, but there's an easy way to find out. Make a texture that does not tile, so you'll be able to see each repeat, apply the texture to your ground, and then simply count the repeats.

I think it's 1 repeat every 4 meters, but I could be wrong. I've never actually tested it.

I just ran through some textures on a new island just to see what they looked like. I wanted something lighter in color than the standard yellowish sandy beaches. I will tell you that unless your texture is very uniform the tiling becomes quite obvious. A while back I made some sand textures with ripples and a little variance in the pattern and they looked terrible. In the end I downloaded the standard primitive island sand texture, lightened it up in PSP to my liking and uploaded it back into SL.

To download the standard textures you have to make a copy and place it in your texture folder (it won't save to your hd from the library folder for some reason), open it, then go to File > Save Texture as...

Okies, got the answer to that one, but, as usual, another question arises.

I created a texture tga file, 512 x 512, 24 bit, no Alpha, black background, but with a thin white border around the edges. I then uploaded a new terrain file with a single height of 1m above sea-level, and loaded the texture.

Beautiful crosshatch was the result, and I could count the squares easily. But, and here's the next question...

The crosshatch, or grid, was 1/2 a tile, then 20 tiles, then 1/2 tile wide, and the same in length. Or, to think of it another way, a 20 x 20 grid, with a half-tile border all around it.

Anyone know why this is so, and not a simple 21 x 21 grid??

Rock

I suppose it starts tiling from the center, and not from a corner. That would explain why it leaves half a tile at the borders.

I suspect the tiles on the edges are blended into the next ones. In a normal terrain texture, it blurs the edge between the texture bands.

Terrain textures do need to be uniform, and you can NOT make one huge texture to spread over a large area. The exact tiling is not something you control.

It would be nice if you could do a texture of something like a multi-street city block layout, with pavement, sidewalks, lawns, and the like all laid out. But the needed texture would be huge. SL uses fairly small tiles, repeated a lot, to speed rez times.

it is a technology called megatexturing, it use a single high resolution texture of very large size which is sliced in chunks and streamed dynamically from the hard disk, and is for obvious reasons reserved to non streamed games