A couple questons about prim texturing...

I just happened to notice that the plain plywood prims are using 512 x 512 textures on them. If one is concerned about texture lag, should they make sure all faces of the prim no longer have this plywood texture?

Also i was told that you shouldn't texture all faces of a prim if those faces are hidden because that consumes unnecessary video memory. Is this true as well?

If you happen to want the plywood texture on one or more faces, then use it. If you want the basic look of it, and you're really concerned about its size, you can always download it, resize it to 256x256 or something, and then upload your resized version. One 512 won't make or break your texture load though. If ALL your textures were 512 where 256 or smaller would look fine, then you'd have a problem. But if it's just the one, all you're talking about is a few hundred kilobytes of memory.

Really though, I wouldn't use that plywood at all, even resized. It's pretty ugly to begin with, but even if it weren't, the very fact that everyone knows it's default makes your work look unfinished when you use it. If you want people to perceive your work as complete, use non-default textures always.


Every face of every prim has to have a texture on it. There's no way to have a face be untextured. So I'm not sure what the person who told you not to texture hidden faces might have meant. You can't "not texture" anything.

What would be a waste would be to put a unique texture onto a hidden face. Since the hidden faces are never seen, if a texture occurs only on a hidden face and nowhere else, that texture is definitely wasting memory.

However, if hidden faces have the same texture(s) on them as visible faces, then there's no waste of texture memory at all. The textures are already in use visibly, so they're already in memory. Repeating them onto the hidden faces will not add to the load.

Hidden faces do of course mean wasted polygons, but there's no way around that in SL, so there's little point in talking about it.

One unrelated reason people sometimes texture hidden faces differently is to reduce the visibility of seams when a pair of prims are butted up against each other to make a continuous surface. It's not uncommon to use a very small full alpha texture, or a blank texture colored to blend in somewhat with the visible faces. YMMV.

Thanks for the quick replies. I was questioning the info in the second question I asked because I had never heard that before. So i thought i would ask here. Also do texture repeats on a face of a prim cause any sort of texture lag as well, such as many repeats?

Chosen - I do not want to second guess your response here, but can you explain what the "blank" option is when you remove the plywood texture - is this just another texture - perhaps a lower resolution one - maybe this is what the OP's friend meant?

Whether a texture is repeated 100 times or 1 time, there's still just one instance of it in memory.


The Blank button just puts a pure white texture onto the surface. It doesn't "untexture" it.

The blank texture is significantly smaller than the default plywood, although still not as small as it really should be. It's 32x32. Since there's nothing on it but a uniform color, there's no reason for it to be any size other than the absolute minimum the system allows, which is 8x8.* At 32x32, it's 16 times larger than it should be for maximum efficiency.

The difference is only 2.8 kilobytes, so it's not like it's all that much, practically speaking. But in principle, 16 times is 16 times. The 3 kilobytes of memory consumed by the 32x32 would be just 192 bytes at 8x8.



* Ideally, any monotone texture should be 1x1. But for whatever reason, SL doesn't allow anything smaller than 8x8.

You COULD of course use the default "missing image" texture. Allthough it still IS a texture (and thus consumes memory in your computer RAM) it wont cause server lag or lan related lag. The texture is allready on your computer in the secondlife\skins\texture directory:

32dfd1c8-7ff6-5909-d983-6d4adfb4255d.tga

Using a allready used texture (that can be seen by the avatar) is just as good an option, as mentioned above. I just wanted to be complete