Image/Canvas Size?

Okay, I ask a lot of questions but this will be my last for a while. I was told to have my canvas no smaller than 2048x2048 when making clothing then resize it too 512x512, I have noticed it makes the template blurry when I do this though, also when I use the brush on a 2048x2048 It looks jagged but really clear idk if you understand lol. Any information you can give me on the size I should work on to get small details in please help.

Thanks in advance!

The resolutions you're working at are fine. If you are increasing the size of a smaller template obviously there will be blurring during the enlargement. It's relatively easy to use a UV mapping application to generate higher resolution wireframe templates to work from if that is what you need. If, however, you are getting blurring during a downsize from 2048, then that gets into a completely different issue. I don't know which image editor (Photoshop, Gimp, PSP) you are using, so a more specific answer to your question will have to wait for more details on your end.

It's by far and away the best thing to work 1:1 or actual size to get the good results on a finished texture. SL textures are so small that you cannot afford to lose even one in two pixels if crisp detail is important. Clothing and skin textures are ideally made at 512 because that is the optimum size they will be baked at eventually.

You can achieve good results working at 1028 but you will need an intuitive sense of what will happen to the texture after it has been reduced to a quarter of its size, which is difficult to predict even in good programs such as Photoshop. At any rate, working on 2048 textures is very ill-advised: the finished texture would be an eighth of its original size so there is no small wonder that it may look very blurry because every individual pixel is doing the job of eight pixels in your original image. Even if you apply something like the unsharp mask filter after reducing the work to its baked size the results will be hardly salvageable.

By the way, canvas size refers to your work area whereas image size is what actually gets 'printed' on paper or screen. Check out the stickies at the top of Texturing Tips. Almost anything that's worth knowing about texturing is in there somewhere.

Try reading the sticky thread on file sizes and formats at the top of this forum very carefully. You'll find the answers to many of your questions there.

I'm using photoshop. The only reason I tried a 2048 Is because that's what I read In a thread but wanted definite answers.

I find that 1024x1024 is a perfectly adequate size to work in for making clothing layers unless I am doing a lot of fine details. When you resize your image, there is a dropdown menu in the image size box (at the bottom) which says "Bicubic (best for smooth gradients)". Change this to "Bicubic Sharper (best for reduction)" and you will retain a lot of your details nicely when you size the image down to 512x512 for upload to SL.

Yeah. I'd use 2048 or bigger if my PC could handle it but I limit working canvas sizes to 1024 or 1536 at a pinch. I have memory and cpu limits. Just remember that when you resize down, lines less than a pixel or two wide may disappear. I suppose Photoshop will handle that better than Gimp.

And I gotta keep vertices in Blender below 100,000 or it's a crawl. I need a new PC.

I may be wrong, but isn't there templates that are at 2048 we can download? I thought I read somewhere that they were available. It doesn't matter much to me right now since my monitor does not have the real estate for that.........but everything else about this computer can handle it so when (and if) this stinking economy gets better I intend to get a monitor that will.

Good tip Kornscope about sizing down in GIMP. I haven't run into any lines disappearing on me but then I never draw a line smaller than 2 pixels........unless I'm drawing something on a separate layer to use as a selection for something on another layer. I use the 1024 templates and always resize to 512 or smaller.