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Free Textures

Alexander Hinkle
Registered User
Join date: 11 Sep 2006
Posts: 148
10-02-2006 04:26
Two things... first, I found some more free textures (see below). Second, from a technical perspective, why is 512x512 pixels the largest texture SL can work with, or am I incorrect?

http://www.eefoof.com/image/15592

http://www.eefoof.com/image/15593

http://www.eefoof.com/image/15594

http://www.eefoof.com/image/15595

http://www.eefoof.com/image/15596

http://www.eefoof.com/image/15598

http://www.eefoof.com/image/15599
Chosen Few
Alpha Channel Slave
Join date: 16 Jan 2004
Posts: 7,496
10-02-2006 09:31
From: Alexander Hinkle
Second, from a technical perspective, why is 512x512 pixels the largest texture SL can work with, or am I incorrect?
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512x512 is not the cap. SL can utilize textures up to 1024x1024. It was 2048x2048 for a while, but allegedly, that was causing crashes on certain graphics cards, so in the last patch they dropped it back down to 1024x1024.

That having been said, always keep your textures as small as is humanly possible. The biggest reason SL runs as slowly as it does is because of texture mismanagement. Professional game artists take the time to optimize all textures within their projects to help ensure everything runs as fast as possible, but the majority of SL users do not. As a result, the average scene in SL has gigabytes worth of texture data in view while the average video card can only process a few hundred megabytes at most.

Consider that every single 1024x1024 uses 3 or 4MB worth of texture memory, and every 512 uses 768KB or 1MB, while a 256x256 only uses 192KB or 256KB, a 128x128 only uses 48KB or 64KB, and so on (the reason for the or's, by the way, is because textures with alpha channels are always 33% larger than those without). Every time someone uses a larger texture where a smaller one would have worked just fine, they're at least quadrupling the workload on the client.

Anyway, as for technical reasons for the size requirements, first OpenGL requires that all textures be in measured in powers of two. Second, LL says they have found that some systems crash upon processing textures larger than 1024. Third, this is more social than technical, but they do always need to impose at least some restriction on size or else morons could upload textures that are tens of thousands of pixels wide, and consume all of our individual computer's processing power in one shot. That would be disastrous.

Perhaps you got the 512 idea from the clothing templates, which are all 512x512. Those templates are that size just because they are. For whatever reason, LL must have felt that that was the optimum balance between pixel detail and performance for avatar textures. The system goes through a complex process to bake your various garments and skin textures into a single set every time you put on an outfit. If you want more info on how that works, there was recently a good post about it on the Linden blog.
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