Importing sharp textures

What are the tricks about importing textures?

I can get quite useable imports but they are never quite sharp.

I create them in photoshop (360pixel/inch), they are quite sharp when I save
them as 24 or 32 TGA files

I've tried 512 sqr and 1024 sqr pics - tend to get better results when
the is an alpha channel involved but obviously don't want an Alpha
channel in most work.

SL uses JPEG2000 compression, which is a little bit lossy. Generally, it's hardly noticeable though.

Also, SL happens to be better at blowing up small textures to full screen size than just about any program I've ever seen. To deomonstrate this, put a 256x256 on a cube and zoom in on it so it fills the screen. If you're running SL at 1024x768, you're now seeing that texture at roughly 16 times its normal size, and it still looks great. SL has a lot of faults, but this is one area where it truly excels.

So I'm not what you're defining as "not sharp". Post a screenshot maybe?

For the best visual experience, make sure all your detail settings are all the way up and turn on anisotropic filtering in your SL preferences. Also go into your graphics card settings and assign SL a profile that includes some anti-aliasing. For whatever reason, SL has no internal anti-aliasing setting of its own, so you have to do it through the video card settings. With max detail, anisotropic filtering, and anti-aliasing all in place, SL can look quite good. You'll really be surprised what you've been missing if those things are currently turned off.

Everything in the above paragraph is assuming you have a fairly good computer. If your system is older or just isn't all that powerful, you might not be able to run SL at those settings. Play with it and see.

BTW, don't worry about pixels per inch in your textures. That only matters for print. Whether you're working at 1 ppi or 1 million ppi, a pixel is always a pixel. SL has no idea what an inch is. Just worry about the total number of pixels. For a list of acceptable sizes, see the sticky at the top of the forum.

Hey thanks for that

Do your creating and editing with as big a picture as you can find (if you are using photos as the base)

Do NOT repeatedly edit and save JPGs ... convert them to TIFF or XCF or other uncompressed format for your editing.

The last steps should be resizing and "unsharp mask" (in the GIMP, I have no clue about Photoshop). I use a small correction factor. You will have to experiment on the test grid to see what works best for your textures.

You might also need to do some pixel-level changes (after sharpening) to ensure that detail comes through. I make sure eyes have a highlight, flowers have a cente, etc.

http://slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=images&ItemID=217335 was pixel-edited to put in the highlight in the eye and the shadows in the tailfeathers.

Your application software for processing images will always be FAR better at scaling your images than SL could ever hope to be. So I would NEVER save a 300 DPI image directly to a .tga file and try to get SL to import that. The result will be a mess, and very inefficient.

By all means DO create the image at a higher resolution! I normally stay with 72 DPI, but scale the dimensions up to 4x or more the size I intend as the final image size. So for something that will be sold as a 256 x 256 texture, I create it at 1024 x 1024.

Last steps:

*Save the full-detail Photoshop file, with all the layers and channel info. You'll want this if you ever have to go back and tweak the image, or if you ever need to prove you created it.

*Save-as to a new file name, and in that new file, flatten the image and scale the image size down to the final resolution, such as 512 x 512. Then save THAT image as a .tga file, and import it. It doesn't have to be square, but the dimensions in each direction MUST be one of the following values : 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 or 1024. Any other size, like 300, and SL will be re-sizing that image to one of the above values. And will do a worse job of it than your graphics software.

Doing it this way ensures that it is your graphics application that handles all the scaling and anti-aliasing, and not SL. The images will look MUCH better!

Once again, DPI (or PPI) is irrelevant for textures. It only matters for print, and kind of sort of matters for things like web design. What's important for texturing is the total number of pixels, not how many of them would fit into an inch. The 3D models the textures are being applied to have no idea what inches are.

So, whether you choose to work at 300 DPI or 72 DPI or 1DPI or 1 million DPI, your 256x256 texture will always be a 256x256 texture. The only difference along the way will be how many inches Photoshop's ruler will display if you happen to have it set to show inches instead of pixels (which you shouldn't anyway).

Yes, Chosen. The DPI doesn't matter in the final output. However...

If an artist designs a texture at 10 by 10 inches and 300 DPI, then they are asking SL to convert an image that measures 3000 pixels in each direction into an acceptable form. They will likely get rescaled to 1024 x 1024, and a lot of data discarded in the conversion process.

If, on the other hand, they rescale their image to 512 x- 512 in their graphic app before saving it, then SL won't mess with rescaling. And if they were working at 72 DPI when they rescaled it, then the image on their screen will, in most cases, be an "actual pixels" image, accurately representing what the SL version will look like. If that same file in Photoshop was 300 DPI, they see a postage stamp, until they expand their view to "Actual Pixels".

I get what you're saying, Ceera, but I thing you're over-applying your logic regarding inches. My point is that people should forget about inches altogether and just think about total pixels. Do that, and none of your other points matter.

That having been said, there are a couple of points of yours I'd like to address.

I think the main problem with your argument is right here:



Do you actually know any artists who design textures this way? I don't.

You're of course technically correct that if someone were actually to try that then SL would end up discarding 2/3 of the pixels, and it wouldn't do as good of a job of it as Photoshop would. However, I think the point is moot because nobody starts a texture by thinking about inches. As I've said several times now, all anyone should be thinking about is the total number of pixels. Inches have no bearing.





That really isn't true.

In Photoshop, if you're at 100% maginification, you're always seeing "actual pixels", regardless of dpi. Every zoom value on the navigator is a percentage of actual pixels.

To see the effects of dpi, you actively have to choose to view your image at Print Size, which it never is at by default. It's pretty tough to edit anything effectively at that zoom level (20-30% of full magnification), and it's usually not even accurate on most screens anyway. That's why Print View is buried in the View menu instead of having a dedicated presence in the GUI. It's not often used because it's not often useful.

Whether someone works regularly with photos, textures, or any other type of image, they should be used to working with actual pixels on screen and not thinking much about dpi during the editing process. For the photographer or the graphic designer, dpi comes into play when thinking about at what size and quality to print the photo, but during the actual processing work, it has little if any bearing. For the texture artist it has no bearing at all.

Even the magic number 72 ppi, is only an arbitrary figure. Very few modern monitors actually operate at that resolution. For example, the two monitors on my desktop are both 24" with pixel counts of 1920x1200, or approximately 94 ppi. My laptop screen has the exact same pixel count, but it's only a 17" screen, which puts it at about 132 ppi. If someone's got a 19" screen at 1600x1200, that would be about 116 ppi, while the same size screen at 1280x1024 would be roughly 96 ppi (both resolutions are available for 19" flat panels). The number 72 really doesn't have much to do with anything anymore.

I'd strongly encourage everyone reading this to forget all about dpi or ppi in relation to texturing. It has no relevance.