Geuis Dassin
Filming Path creator
Join date: 3 May 2006
Posts: 565
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05-09-2006 18:00
If I wanted to make a big rectangle in the proportions of a 16:9 screen(to show movies and such) what is the maximum resolution of pixels per square meter?
Basically I want to know what dimensions in Photoshop I need to use to create an image that I'll apply to a flat surface in SL.
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Goshua Lament
Registered User
Join date: 25 Dec 2003
Posts: 703
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05-09-2006 20:29
I think it depends to some degree on the repeats per meter, but a movie *should* play at its maximum resolution on the prim face, so I dont think that should be an issue. As far as the specific pixel dimensions go, I usually go for something like an inch a meter if I'm working for super high resolutio at 72 ppi.
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Chosen Few
Alpha Channel Slave
Join date: 16 Jan 2004
Posts: 7,496
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05-09-2006 20:48
There is no correlation whatsoever between pixels and meters. Zoom in on a 1-meter object so it fills your screen, and that object may be 1024 or 1280 pixels wide. Now look at the same object from a great distance and it might be only 10 or 12 pixels wide.
The physical size of objects is completely arbitrary and irrelevant to the size of textures. Meters have no meaning as far as graphics is concerned. Those kinds of measurements only exist so that we silly humans can help ourselves complete the illusion that the virtual world is indeed a world. Beyond that, object "size" means nothing.
The question you should ask yourself for texturing is not how big of an object is a texture going onto, but how closely are people going to look at the texture, and how many pixels are necessary to show all the detail in the image iteself. Then balance that against speed (larger textures = slower). That's it. If something is likely to take up a lot of the screen, or if it needs to have a lot of fine text or other tiny details, give it a big texture. If it's not gonna occupy a lot of the screen, or if it's fairly plain, make it as small as possible.
In most cases, and for most purposes, 256x256 ideal. I usually suggest that people make 75% of their textures be 256x256 or smaller, 20% be 512x512, and 5% be 1024x1024. For something that is to be proportioned 16:9, I'd probably pad it on a canvas size of 128x256 or 256x512 and then use repeats per face to hide the padding.
Anyway, since you ARE talking about movies here, the texture really doesn't matter at all. The texture on the screen is just gonna be replaced by the Quicktime overlay, so who cares what it actually is? Just throw any old thing up there and be done with it. The screen in my theater is 16M wide by 9M tall (suprise, suprise), and I think the texture I made for it was something like 64x128 (made it ages ago though, so I don't remember the exact size off hand). It's mostly blank white with just a little bit of gray noise on it to make it look somewhat like the canvas that movie screens are made out of, nothing fancy. Most people never even see it, I'm sure, since they probably hit the play button as soon as they enter the theater, and they just see the Quicktime movie, not the static texture it replaces.
For movie size, I generally go with 320x240. SL is phenominal at blowing up small images to full screen size and making them look like they're supposed to be that size, so 320x240 is usually plenty big enough to look pretty good, even though most people are probably seeing it at 3-4 times that size. For performance reasons, I hesitate to use movies that are any bigger. Some people have low bandwidth which would make bigger movies take forever to load, some have low memory which would make playback choppy, etc. Gotta try to accomodate everyone as much as possible.
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Loydin Tripp
It may be virtual but...
Join date: 28 Apr 2006
Posts: 150
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05-10-2006 01:20
From: Chosen Few There is no correlation whatsoever between pixels and meters. Zoom in on a 1-meter object so it fills your screen, and that object may be 1024 or 1280 pixels wide. Now look at the same object from a great distance and it might be only 10 or 12 pixels wide.
The physical size of objects is completely arbitrary and irrelevant to the size of textures. Meters have no meaning as far as graphics is concerned. Those kinds of measurements only exist so that we silly humans can help ourselves complete the illusion that the virtual world is indeed a world. Beyond that, object "size" means nothing. I think in general you are correct, this is after all a 'virtual' reality. But I think what may be important and possibly the core of Geuis's question is the relative dimensional relationship between different objects in Second Life. I guess you could call this in-world scale and aspect ratio. The reason something looks size dramatic in SL is because the object is above the average size of everything else. The meter is the rule and everything seems to relate to it but your point is correct in that the outcome is always seen through the camera or avatars eye, close up or far away. From: Chosen Few ...1024x1024. I was curious about this, I am no expert on Second Life but I have read in some other forum replies that an image with this resolution gets down sampled by SL to half that size, 512x512. Is this true? I would prefer that you are right or higher. What is the final word on the top size without down sampling? From: Chosen Few For movie size, I generally go with 320x240. This would actually be incorrect, unless there is some extraordinarily unique condition in Second Life. As the aspect ratio must be maintained to avoid a pixel stretching along one of the image axis you would need to use a size that was the same aspect ratio of 16:9. Some of those options would be using a set of divisors 1,2,3,4, 5 and 6.... 1600/900, 800/450, 533.33/300 400/225, 320/180 or 200/150 - of coarse you cannot have partial pixels so the divisor of 3 would need to be rolled up to 534 or down to 532, either would cause unnoticeable stretching.
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Chosen Few
Alpha Channel Slave
Join date: 16 Jan 2004
Posts: 7,496
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05-10-2006 09:57
From: Loydin Tripp I think in general you are correct, this is after all a 'virtual' reality. But I think what may be important and possibly the core of Geuis's question is the relative dimensional relationship between different objects in Second Life. I guess you could call this in-world scale and aspect ratio. The reason something looks size dramatic in SL is because the object is above the average size of everything else. The meter is the rule and everything seems to relate to it but your point is correct in that the outcome is always seen through the camera or avatars eye, close up or far away. Right, but none of that has anything to do with texture size, and that was the point. From: Loydin Tripp I was curious about this, I am no expert on Second Life but I have read in some other forum replies that an image with this resolution gets down sampled by SL to half that size, 512x512. Is this true? I would prefer that you are right or higher. What is the final word on the top size without down sampling? Not true. There is some debate over whether textures on avatars are fixed at 512, but for everything else, 1024 is 1024. You can easily verify this by using the texture consol. Press ctrl-shift-3 and a window will pop up displaying all the info about every texture in your field of view. Acceptable sizes for textures are all powers of two between 32 and 2048. From: Loydin Tripp This would actually be incorrect, unless there is some extraordinarily unique condition in Second Life. As the aspect ratio must be maintained to avoid a pixel stretching along one of the image axis you would need to use a size that was the same aspect ratio of 16:9.
Some of those options would be using a set of divisors 1,2,3,4, 5 and 6....
1600/900, 800/450, 533.33/300 400/225, 320/180 or 200/150 - of coarse you cannot have partial pixels so the divisor of 3 would need to be rolled up to 534 or down to 532, either would cause unnoticeable stretching. I guess I should have explained better. You're correct that 320x240 is not a 16:9 ratio; it's 4:3. However, you'll find that 320 width is pretty much standard for "small" Quicktime movies on the web, and that 240 is the most common height measurement that goes with it. I pretty much said 240 there out of habit more than anything else, which hopefully is forgivable since it was pretty late when I posted, and I was very tired. For the movies I usually show, you're right; 240 wouldn't be correct. For widescreen movies, there are actually several different standards. 16x9 (1.78:1)is the ratio for widescreen TV's but it's not the standard for cinematic movies. Those are generally 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 for modern films, or 1.37:1 for classic films (mid 1950's and older). Keeping 320 as the width then gives you a height of 180 for 16:9, 173 or 136 for modern films, or 234 for classic films. To fit perfectly on a 16:9 screen, obviously 180 is the only right number to go with 320, but since that's nowhere near as common as 240 or the other widescreen numbers, you'll often end up either cropping the movie or else letterboxing your screen. That's something I forgot to mention. To crop, just set the repeats per face so the movie spans the whole screen. To letterbox, set the repeats so you can see the whole movie as large as possible, and then cover the repeating areas with blank prims.
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Osgeld Barmy
Registered User
Join date: 22 Mar 2005
Posts: 3,336
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05-10-2006 18:06
From: someone Uploading textures less than 8x8 pixels may give an error: i think 8x8 gets streached but 16x16 is usefull in some applications (such as graidents, and sprites) 
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Cottonteil Muromachi
Abominable
Join date: 2 Mar 2005
Posts: 1,071
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05-10-2006 18:24
From: Chosen Few You can easily verify this by using the texture consol. Press ctrl-shift-3 and a window will pop up displaying all the info about every texture in your field of view. If you're just checking the pixel dimensions of prims, there is an easy shortcut to find this out. Just select the prim/s or individual prim side and hit ctrl-alt-shift-T. This also tells you which prim side it is and might help those who script texture animations.
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Chosen Few
Alpha Channel Slave
Join date: 16 Jan 2004
Posts: 7,496
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05-11-2006 07:56
From: Cottonteil Muromachi If you're just checking the pixel dimensions of prims, there is an easy shortcut to find this out. Just select the prim/s or individual prim side and hit ctrl-alt-shift-T.
This also tells you which prim side it is and might help those who script texture animations. Very cool. I never knew that. Thanks.
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