Skins with 1024x1024 Textures???

Hi,

Was at a skin store and they had a sign comparing 1024x1024 texture details to 512x512 texture details. I had understood everything gets back down to 512x512. Was something changed and we can now use 1024x1024? Or did I just misunderstand?

Thanks.

As far as I know, We have always been able to use/upload the following textures sizes.
256x256
512x512
1024x1024

Oh, my. I hope 1024x1024 doesn't become popular. I see enough gray people in crowds already. A 1024x1024 skin puts four times the demand on a graphics card as 512x512 does, and my guess is that 99.44% of the people who finally get the texture to rez won't appreciate the extra detail anyway.

ground textures for a region are limited to 512x512, only matters if you have the right to change that, unlikely.
all others are [16..1024 x 16..1024] rounded to powers of 2.

most games till 2000 use textures up to 256x256, barely larger.
most textures you find somewhere today are still 512x512, not so many are larger, 1024 is still rare.
Better textures wont make a much better game, but good shading of the textures will.
It just doesnt make as much sense to have tons of textures that are almost as big as the window resolution that they are all shown in.
Its all a matter of how large the cache of your gfx card is. sl has quite high requirements anyways, because theres tons of objects within a rather poor z-buffer, so youre supposed to have good hardware to begin with, so 1024 is not so much of a deal here.

I always had the impression that skins were capped at 512x512. Perhaps I dreamt this, or perhaps it has changed.

In any case I really can't see the benefit of having a 1024x1024 skin unless you are actually interested in examining all of your own pores, and don't care that you might look a bit grey to other people.

I think the texture when applied to the skin layers within SL are all reduced or enlarged to the same size............I think that's 512 x 512 pixels. Only purpose I can see where someone would upload a 1024 skin texture is to get as much minute detail as possible when applied to the avatar. I don't think it makes a difference in size since it's the same size as any other skin texture anyway.

Ahhhh, but let the complainers complain.

That's what I understand.

Here is a link to the post in which Chosen Few gives us an educated answer to this question:

/109/82/209940/1.html

Yes, when the skin and clothes are all baked to a single layer, it's all reduced to 512x512. The benefit of having the skin or other clothes at 1024x1024 is there is less detail loss from the secondary recompression of the image. So it does make a positive difference, but does *not* cause more lag in world.

ALL 1024x1024 textures cause lag. It is the ultimate is pollution and one the primary reasons most malls and mall type sims and large stores are lagtastic.

A 1024x1024 skin is still loaded and sent around at its huge file size reduced or some or not.

1024x1024 eat up 4x's the memory of a 512x512 and an experienced lag chaser can feel them once they start to load if you are not on some super computer.

The only person who gets the skin textures of your skin is you though.

Your viewer will fetch all the relevant layer textures and bake them into 3 textures (5 actually - head, upper body, lower body, skirt and iris - but the last 2 aren't layered) which are then uploaded back to the sim.

When you see someone else, you fetch their baked textures from the sim. You never download the textures of whatever individual item they're wearing (if it's prim attachment you do download the textures obviously).

(We used to have an "avatar composite limit" which controlled layering avie clothing textures in realtime vs using the baked textures and in that case your client would end up fetching someone else's clothes, but since it's been removed from preferences for a while now I'd guess it no longer applies)

Obviously an over zealous "do gooder".

I'm not even sure it will slow your viewer down on the initial loading of the texture. It's resized when it's applied to the mesh.

Okay, probably a stupid question considering my "age" in SL, but how do you even tell the size of the texture? I know how to do it if I have mod rights on the texture/prim (I can look in the edit texture box to see it), but how do you do it on something you can't modify?

Read Kitty Barnett's post below yours. everyone around you is receiving 512x512 textures. It's downsampled and baked locally on your computer.

I don't care what you say, 1024x1024 textures take longer to load, and cause more lag. I have checked this by usage, not by how things work.

Make a sign with an intricate 1024x1024 pixel design. Upload it.

Then downsize it to 512x512 pixels, and upload that.

Apply both to a prim, at approximately the same time. The 1024 will take longer.

Same with skins, clothes, etc.

As far as I can tell, some skin makers use the 1024 size, and I refuse to buy from them. I bought a couple demos, and they weren't loading so went someplace else, and the entire place was done loading before that one skin.

Either they're using big textures for their skins, or for some reason the textures just aren't liked by the servers (Same effect for a friend I was shopping with. We never saw the fully loaded skin because we gave up after a few minutes.)

It wasn't just slow for me, but this friend saw it load slow as well, and I saw her demo from the same place loading slow.

Thanks, Kitty. I vaguely understood that something like this was going on, but never sat down to think through the implications. Very clever.

So, next question .... when I walk from one sim into another, is there any difference between the way SL handles my three baked av textures and the way it handles my prim attachments? Are all of them uploaded from my hard drive to the new sim, or just the av textures? Or are some (all?) textures passed in world directly from one sim's server to the next?

You can see where I'm going with this, maybe. It has never made sense to me that my av and my prim clothes can't always make the sim crossing together successfully. If they are both passed by the same process, I don't see why they get decoupled. If they're being passed in separate processes, though ......

I have pondered this for ages as one of the mysteries of SL.

All debate aside, it is simply a bad idea to upload 1024x1024 textures unless creating texture sheets, or uploading them for something that is going to be viewed so close that it takes up the full screen. Neither case applies to the avatar.

The comparative results in quality between uploading 1024 vs. 512 for an avatar is SO minimal as to be a complete waste of time. Besides taking forever to upload, 1024x1024 gets reduced to 512x512 anayways. PSCS2 and 3 have much more sophisticated algorithms for reducing pixel information through Bicubic w/Sharpen interpolation. SL's interpolation does not do as nice a job. The faux image clarity people see is probably the result of the default nearest neighbor interpolation (just a guess). Reduce to 512x512 and interpolate in Photoshop, then let SL deal with the J2C compression, which will not blur the image, but simply reduce and compress some of the color information in the image.

OK, but that's consistent with what Kitty said. When you get a demo, or when you buy a 1024x1024 skin from a vendor, you are the first user. So when you wear it that first time, your machine downloads the 1024x1024, bakes it, and uploads it back to the sim as a 512x512. I'd expect that to be slow. After that first time, though, your machine doesn't have to go through the relatively slow step of downloading the 1024x1024 any more. The texture on your av should load faster than a 1024x1024 texture that you bought in world, stored in your inventory, and apply to a prim --- still as a 1024x1024. In theory, of course .....

I'm not trying to defend a 1024x1024 texture for anything, mind you. As Namssor says, unless you are going to blow up an image to fill your entire screen, you'll never appreciate that level of detail anyway.

Really believe the "sales angle" for 1024 skins is that they have used a 1024 by 1024 template to create it. I'm pretty sure they would be reduced to 512 by the creater BEFORE uploading. I don't make skins but I do make clothes and it's the same thing just a different avatar layer that it is placed on. I make all my clothes on 1024 templates (Chip Midnight and Robin Sojourner). I reduce the size to 512 before uploading............why? Because even a novice like me knows it's a waste of time to do otherwise. I'm sure a skin maker with the skills to make a decent skin would know that too.

But, if they did upload at the 1024 size you and everyone else sees is 512 x 512. Aside from the initial baking that you might experience when first put on it's not one bit different than any other skin.

You know you could upload at 256 too........it would resize to 512. Skins and clothes are all at 512 x 512 once put on. And you would not get any performance boost either.

And I believe I've heard of templates at 2048 x 2048 (I believe Chip Midnight offers them but I would not swear by that). Why so big? To make it easier to create the item with more detail and ability to line up seams (I can imagine the uproar that would cause. ).The created item is not for upload at size the item that is going to be 512 x 512 anyway.

But it still doesn't explain it for when it's someone else wearing that demo, and still loads super super slow, does it?

Sure..... It still takes time for that person to download it at 1024x1024, bake it, and upload it as 512x512. If you're watching, she is taking a long time to rez.

I'm not saying this is what actually happens, I'm just saying that if what Kitty says is correct, it makes sense that the first time you wear a 1024x1024 skin it will take ages to rez. The proof of the theory would be to see what happens after that. The skin should rez normally on subsequent appearances because it's already baked on your av. I'd really like to know if that's the case, but I don't want to buy a 1024x1024 skin to find out. I'd also like to know the answer to my question about why prim attachments and textures on my av behave differently as I cross a sim boundary. I think the answer is in Kitty's explanation.

I don't think you can anymore with no-mod clothing, LL changed a few things about being able to see textures on things that are no-mod.

For prims you just select a face of a prim, or a whole prim (with Edit Linked Parts) or the entire linkset and use Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T.

Per prim you can tell how many unique textures there are since it will group them together:

You're dealing with a few different things here .
(Also remember there are 5 baked textures in all (three for your body, then iris and skirt as well), it's just that your skin only matters when it comes to the three that make up your body)

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You don't fetch your own baked texture back from the sim, you just use the one you baked yourself (as long as it's still in your cache anyway). If something goes wrong with uploading the baked texture you can get disconnects between what other people see and what you see (they could see your previous outfit while you see the new one, or they could see you covered in the unflattering "missing image".

When your viewer uploads the baked textures, it does differ from a regular texture upload in that the regular texture upload will get stored on the asset server while the baked textures will exist as a pseudo-asset on the sim. As a result of that change, I do think your baked textures travel with you from sim to sim (they're passed around between sims with the rest of you). Again, if something goes wrong there others will see you differently than you do. (In general you also want to wait 10-30 seconds after you're fully rebaked to yourself before tp'ing/crossing sim borders to make sure the sim is all caught up. That or rebake as soon as you arrive)

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Attachments are a special case of regularly rezzed prims: when you first wear the attachment, the sim will fetch the asset from the asset server and add it to its "actively simulated objects" list. At that point you have two seperate copies in existance: the asset on the asset server and the simulated copy in the sim (aka "the rezzed copy".

When you detach an attachment, the sim you're on will upload the rezzed copy back to the asset server and replace the old one (it probably actually creates an entirely new asset and updates the reference in your inventory).

If the sim crashes while you're on it, and you made a change to your attachment, the change will be lost (only a detach uploads it back) which will explain that behaviour. Or if the sim has stuck pending asset operations when you log off (or you crash) your log-out will stall until your attachments get uploaded again, which is one of/the reason you sometimes see "Your account won't be available until....".

So as far as prim attachments are concernced: they do get sent from sim to sim (along with the running state of any scripts in them), but that's merely the basic prims (cube of size x, cut and hollowed so and so, sphere so and so, etc), the textures applied on those prims will come from the asset server, they're not part of the actual prims.

While you do obviously download your attachments to render them, actually handing them from sim to sim isn't anything your viewer plays an active role in. It just gets notified about changes.

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Most attachment problems are likely to be viewer bugs though: some attachments relocating to your behind is one, half of an attachment dissapearing for no reason (most likely to happen if it was occluded for any significant amount of time) is, etc.

They can go both ways too: you can see yourself normal while others see something that's messed up, or you see the problem but noone else does.

Detaching and reattaching should get everyone in sync again.

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Probably not the definite answer to all attachment headaches you were looking for . But hopefully the difference between baked textures (a viewer created those based on textures it downloaded), attachments (created from an asset when first worn, exists only on the sim, gets passed around between sims) and textures on attachments (exist on the asset server, sim fetches them from the asset server, then sends those to avies) will make a little sense now .