Is there such a thing as a tiny texture?

I am working with tiny proms and need tiny textures to put on them. Do tiny textures, or something else like that, exist in SL?
Full sized textures are too big for the objects I am making.

Hi Ruby, yes we can upload very small textures. 8 by 8 works OK but I see KDU errors with smaller ones. A texture atlas could be good if you have many small textures in your project, then you can load only one to do it all.

What I need is a tiny texture with some resolution, more than an 8x8 can provide
Something created comparable to a tiny prim.

Oh I see! If that is so then you do not have to do anything special. You could need to fix the repeat or the offset if the prim is tortured but it will work the same as a bigger prim.

Your textures can any size that follows the powers of two convention. You could use a 1024 by 1024 texture on a very small prim. The texture will "shrink" (as well as expand if you are making the prim larger) along with the sizing of the prim......just make sure you have the box ticked to "stretch textures". A large texture on a very small prim would likely not look good though. As you reduce the size of the prim you also reduce the surface area for the texture to be displayed.......all those pixels will simply squish together to become somewhat of blurry looking mess. Any line or area of the texture will have to be big enough to still be seen when reduce to the smaller size......no pixel can be smaller than one. So if you have a texture that has lines or parts of the texture that are, say, 6 pixels in width at 1024 would be reduced to a single pixel if it's reduced to 1/6 its size. It will remain at that one pixel as you reduce the size further..........so if you reduce that prim's size to 1/12 the size where the texture looked good it will look terrible. You're not going to be able to get a lot of detail on tiny prims unless you figure what detail you want shown at the size you want the prim to be ahead of time. It's hard to create textures at extremely small sizes. But the way I've done it to create the texture at about 256 (or even 12 and, depending on much I'm going to have to reduce the size of the texture with the prim reduction I'll make any lines or areas of detail exxagerated........say, instead of 6 pixel wide line I'll make that line 12 pixels. You also have to exxerate the distance between your areas of detail for the same reasons.

I don't know how small you want these prims but if they are going to be seen with any detail at all they would have to be at least .05 meters. You'll have to experiment to see what works best for you and what you are trying to do. The textures when uploaded probably won't look good........but when reduced in size for your prim they'll look good.

I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish the same end.......this is just a way I did it and it worked. Took a couple tries but once I got it pretty much in my head what was happening it was pretty simple.

Please minimize the use of tiny prims and especially the use of large textures on tiny prims. Keep in mind that most of the time, people will NOT zoom into your creations, but they WILL be annoyed by the client side lag they cause. Eventually they will look at avatar rendering cost and identify you as the worst offender.

If you want to impress people with your creations, learn how to fake geometry detail by baking it into textures. This is how professional game designers work, and this is why professional games don't suck as much as SL does in terms of lag and frame rates.

Avatar rendering cost is a joke. Unreliable at best. What's a high ARC score for me might be nothing for the avatar next to me...........at best it is a measurement of your hardware's abilities to render a scene without lagging your computer. It's meaningless as a tool to judge the quality of any texture, prim, script, or anything else except the ability of your personal computer and it's setup to handle what is displayed at any given instant in SL.

But, I agree on the use of any texture larger than necessary for any prim. A texture too large for the prim will look like hell. However a texture too small for a prim will look just as bad (assuming you want detail shown). Depending on how tiny these prims are I would say nothing larger than 128 pixels at upload..........but if the prim is near the .01 meter size I wouldn't even waste the upload fee for any texture and simply use the building texture/color picker. Make your textures according to what you are attempting to accomplish. Some experimenting is probably going to be in order but once you get a feel for how a texture will look when it's applied to a prim and reduced (or enlarged) in size you can actually simulate it in your imaging program by scaling the image up or down to see the effect on the detail. Texture sizes that I would think might work for very small prims would be 32, 64 and (as a maximum size) 128. Anything larger would be a waste and likely to give less detail instead of more.

There is absolutely no correlation between texture size and prim size. What's relevant is how much of the screen the object is likely to occupy, not how it's measured in imaginary in-world units that we happen to call meters.

If an object is likely to take up a large portion of the screen at a reasonably normal viewing distance, then give it a large texture. If it's likely to take up only a small part of the screen, give it a small texture. That's it.

Read the sticky on texture sizes at the top of the forum for more on this. There's a section in it, entitled "Choosing the Right Texture Size For the Job".

No one ever claimed that it was something else than that. It's certainly not meant to indicate how fashionable your avatar is (as you seemed to believe at some point).

Microprims are literally invisible most of the time, yet they slow down rezzing and screen refresh for everyone around. That's why microprim attachments are considered low quality. Their overall contribution to the SL user experience is negative. Too many resources, too little impact.

Fear my behind-the-eye pressure gauge! XD



It's SL, we're superficial. Just make it look good. (^_^)y

I need a prim that is just smaller than a normal prim is allowed to be. And when I apply a 1024x1024 texture it is not shrunken to fit and smaller textures do not have the needed resolution

mkay... first.. there is absolutely no reason to use a texture that big, on something that small... use a much smaller texture like 32/32 or smaller...

second, it sounds like the problem you are having is either not having stretch textures checked, or you are losing part of your texture to cuts.

the solution to the first problem is obvious, make sure that's checked...

the solution to the second problem is to manually change the horizontal and vertical repeats per face, and you may need to change the offset as well. this can be a bit more difficult.

a cube with a slice start of .25 and end of .75 for example is half the normal height. so to get a single repeat of the texture you'd need to double the vertical repeats. if it were set to 0.0 and .50 slices you'd also need to change the vertical offset by .5 (since it's no longer centered)... other cuts will have similar effects.

Masami is right on target. Nobody needs a texture with that high a resolution on a prim that small. 99.44% of all residents will never even know that the prim exists in the first place, and 99.44% of those people will never zoom in close enough to see the texture on that tiny prim, but 100% of all people in the vicinity of the thing will have their rendering load increased because their video cards are having to process the texture unnecessarily. This is a lag producer. The solution, as everyone so far has suggested, is to use a MUCH smaller texture.