File resolutions questions

OK I built a great looking mottled purple latex texture and built a halter top and pants for my girl with it, but when I upload the tga file it seems lighter and on the low res side. The file is 512x512 and 72 dpi. Will I get a better look with higher resolution?

Ed

yes. max size is 1024x1024 for a texture, but if you upload at 2048x2048 or larger, you get less detail loss. The image will be reduced to 1024 by SL.

The textures are stored by LL as lossy jpegs so you lose detail. Upload as tga, as its not a lossy format, and applying jpeg compression twice isnt doing anyone any good. BMPs are just too huge!

Max resolution for avatar textures is 512x512, and this information is stored in a lossless jpeg 2000 compression. The method that SL uses for resampling higher resolutions is messier than the ones that Photoshop and other products like Debabbelizer use. Your best course of action is to resample the image down to 512x512 outside of SL and save as TGA for upload into SL. Try an unsharp mask on the texture, or somthing with similar effects. Image distortion is unavoidable, and this is going to blur pixel information anyways. That is beyond your control.

THis is what I had done in photoshop. from this description it sounds like the problem is with SL conversion, but I have seen photorealistic clothing that couldn't have been MORE photorealistic before.

Ed

Hi Ed, Welcome to SL.

Maybe I can help a little bit here. First, don't use larger files than 512x512 for clothing. Avatars are the hardest thing for the renderer to deal with, and every 1024x1024 makes it 16 times harder than it needs to be. One of the biggest sources of lag in SL is from people using textures that are larger than they need to be.

Anyway, there shouldn't be any reason you can't get Photorealism on your clothing. Keep a few factors in mind though. First, SL uses a slightly different color gamut than Photoshop does. Type the same RGB value into both programs, and you'll see you've got 2 different colors. Second, due to lighting conditions in the world, especially if you have local lighting turned on, images can look very different in different locations and at different times of day. Third, the nature of wrapping 2D images around 3D models inherently causes distortions. It's a good idea to upload the templates as textures and wear them to see how the different areas bend, curve, grow, and shrink as they wrap around the avatar mesh. Through experience, you eventually develop a kind of intuition for what will and won't work, and you adjust your textures accoringly.

In the mean time, any one of the three factors could be causing your problem. Could you perhaps post some pictures? If I can see the original image and what it looks like on the av, I might be able to tell what's going on. If you're concerned about protecting your original, watermark the hell out of it. All I need to see is a basic impression of it.