is 512 the best tradeoff between detail & filesize?

I need to get jiggy with my texturing and hate to sacrifice more detail than necessary, but I don't wanna choke anyones videocard to death.

Thx in advance for the input

-Z-

I would say 512 is optional for most texturing tasks, Casanova. Eyes can have smaller maps (256 or 12, so can other textures that will appear small in SL - for instance jewelry. It also depends on how much details you put into your textures. Sometimes a 64 texture can actually be better than a 512 one.

I made some posters the other day and uploaded both 1024 and 512 versions of the textures. The 512 ones rezzes on 1/4 of the time (with little difference in image quality) compared to the 1024 versions, so I will use them. It is allways hard to accept lower image resolutions/quality when you have spent hours, days or even weeks creating something. Unfortunately compromises are part of life.


Lis

Yes 512! 1024 rezzes really slow or not at all for some, which means your killer textures look like ugly smears. I also tested the 1024 versus 512 on some of my more detailed clothing designs and the difference in quality was pretty much nil.

how cool of you to ask. good luck with your designs.

1024x1024 is bad. The only time I can ever see them being justified is if you are using tetxure sheeting; a single 1024x1044 is (in some ways) better than four 512x512.

Use the smallest size for the job you need. A lot of things using 512x512 look just as good at 256x256. If the texture looks a little blurred when you zoom right in, don't worry. The same blur exists in every 3d world if you press your nose up against the texture; it doesn't need to be fixed.

Also remember textures dont have to be square; I've used a 1024x32 texture for a long narrow strip with writing before.

512x512 is rather on the large side. Use something smaller unless you display text or something that would look too jaggy. Or let me throw some numbers at you - a 512x512 texture with alpha channel consumes 1MB of videocard memory. There are plenty of people in SL who have 64MB or 128MB cards. You typically have hundreds or thousands prims in your view - and most of them have a texture. What happens then is that SL will downscale the resolution - it will for example display the 256x256 version of a 512x512 texture and you lose details anyway.

Thanks everyone, these are exactly the numbers & NFO I needed. Well I reckon 2048 & up are out( at least for the next 5 years).

I'm actually doing structural textures and have gotten too close to my poly limit to finish the structure,, so I'm having to optimize the geometry & use mural type textures. This will drastically cut down on my poly count and allow me to avoid tiling artifacts, but those darn lil' powers of two I fear will make image quality fairly funky once applied.

I am curious to know, if I did use say 1024X1024 and packed several textures on it, does anyone know if the engine would refrence all faces that use it once, or would it "load the texture" each time it's called for? (hope I worded that concisely)

Thanks again for your time & all the insightful input.

-Z-

Texture sheet applied to several faces will be reused - i.e. the texture will be in the memory only once. However, I only recommend using texture sheets for things that need to be displayed in sync - for example in a card game you want to have all cards rezzed at the same time. On a building it doesn't matter much if a wall loads later than ceiling etc. The reason is what I wrote above - SL will use lower-rez versions of textures when it runs out of video memory. If you have many small textures they are more easily swapped in and out to make room than few large texture sheets.

Gotcha,, thanks again.

-Z-

On the same topic, what's the average file size for a simple shirt? I practiced making a T-Shirt today (going by the standard Linden template, 512x512 with an alpha channel) and the final TGA came out at 1 meg or so. This seems a little big for a simple texture.

I noticed one prior poster stated that a single texture consumes about 1mb of texture memory on a video card. Is the amount of memory consumed on the video card about equal to the size of the texture loaded? And is 1 meg about the average size of a texture in SL? If so, I can see why they ask for a broadband connection.

Also, are 256x256 textures noticibly smaller in file size?

EDIT: I just saved my original 512x512 TGA down to 256x256 and it's now clocking in at 256.0k (coincidence?). This seems much smaller (about a 4th the size of a bigger texture) with no real loss in quality. Since it's a simple graphic (just standard T-shirt texture with some lettering on it) it seems like 256x256 would be good for most simple textures, especially given they come in at 1/4th the size.

in each step of the powers of 2 you gain 4x the detail, becuase its 4x more pixels, and 4x the filesize, becuase its 4x more pixels

filesize in SL doesnt matter much becuase everything is compressed using jpg 2k, which makes your 1mb tga more like 24kb

Right, and correct me if I am mistaken, In layman's terms, if you make a 32 bit TGA 256X256, it will be a fourth the size of 512X512.

Ya know, I can talk about imaging, vector gfx, raster gfx, geometry, etc. all day,,, but how they calculate the megapixle capabilities of a digital camera still eludes me =)