question about texture size on clothing layers

Ever since I read the sticky about filesize almost a year ago, I have uploaded textures for clothing at only 512 (and 256 on 'swatches' to be used on primwork whenever possible). But recently I have been told that even if I upload a texture at 1024, SL resizes it to 512 when the texture is applies to a clothing layer.

The same person said that fine detail shows better when you upload it at 1204 (even though apparently it is resized automatically when it goes onto a clothing layer) which makes sense of course.

So my question is this: on clothing layers, does SL really resize textures to 512? I would love to be able to have a little bit finer detail, but don't want to bog down everyone in my general area. I'm not the sort of person to just believe something so I have to come here and ask people that I know KNOW

When the clothing layers are combined (baked), the generated textures are 512x512 regardless of the original. It's possible that higher resolution textures with Alpha will be overlaid better at the edges if they are higher resolution, depending on his the "baking" operation is implemented, but it's also possible that a higher resolution than 512 will have sampling problems and actually look worse.

Yes, it always gets squished down to 512 at baking time, so that higher detail is going to be stripped out anyway. I guess an argument could be made that you have better source material at baking time with the larger texture, since baking adds another compress step, but you're still smashing stuff down to 1/4 the size at that time so that's really pushing things.

Also there is a legacy quirk in the current avatar system that makes the unbaked textures available to everyone. Larger textures make copying and touch-up easier. This loophole was supposed to be going away once people start using the 1.23 viewer, but I haven't tested to see if LL followed through on that plan yet.

So that's why unbaked avatars were invisible in the 1.23 RC before they pulled it.

They're going to have to do a LOT of tweaking to the implementation before they roll that out. Oh well, any stumbling block in the road to Porntopia is a good one.

I think the invisibility thing might be a slightly different problem, it looks like they may be defaulting to masked out and should do the opposite. I noticed that in 1.23 our own avatar shows up in naked Ruthskin at first, so maybe the invisibility was a quicky hack inspired by the same trainwreck of thought that brought us the clouds?

Thanks guys I believe I will continue on using 512s

Depending on what app you're using it's probably going to do a better, cleaner job of scaling down your texture than SL will, so you're better doing it yourself and uploading at 512x512. Your friend may be thinking it looks better because when you upload you'll see the version from your cache, not the resized SL version. That's more evident on prims than with avatar textures. You won't see the same version everyone else sees until you relog and the texture in question reloads.

thanks Chip!

I will agree with Chip. Virtually any ghraphics app will do a better job of scaling your texture down to 512 x 512 than the SL client upload will. I usually work at 1024 x 1024 ot 2048 x 2048, and then "save as" and reduce that to 512 x 512 just before importing to SL, thereby keeping a seperate full-sized and layered master on my system.