512x512?

I remember seeing it somewhere but cant find the thread now that need it :/ I wanted to make myself some custom textures for a project Im working on. I Think saw somewhere the recommended size to use in photoshop is 512 x 512?

well there is no set size you have to use. however the bigger the file size the more detail you will have. that said if you don't require great detail and expect many people to view the texture the smaller the better. 128 x 128 or 256x 256 work just as well for many kinds of textures.

Textures shoudl always be as small as possible to avoid overloading graphics cards on client side rendering. The exceptions are skin and clothes, which all get converted to 512x512 anyway. (I think eyes get converted to 128x128.)

The big problem isn't the download time, but the amount of video memory needed to store an uncompressed version of the texture.

There is no set size for most textures, but you may have seen something on texturing land itself. In that case there are only two sizes 512 x 512 for high-detail and 128 x 128 for low. (Note: You have to own the entire sim to access this option.)

Other than that, no worries. I would play a bit with your textures so see what works for you as far as quality. Sometimes you don't need to go as high-res as you might think.

Hope that gives a clue as to why you've had a bug in your ear.

Edit: Yeah, I just checked and the templates are 512, as well. Sounds like a good size to judge by. ^.^

To compliment what Nepenthis said, consider the following:

Every 2048x2048 texture consumes either 16MB or 12MB of texture memory. (16 with transparency, 12 without)

Every 1024x1024 consumes 4M or 3MB.

Every 512x512 consumes 1MB or 768KB.

Every 256x256 consumes 256KB or 192 KB.

Every 128x128 consumes 64KB or 48KB.

Every 64x64 consumes 16KB or 12KB.

Every 32 x 32 consumes 4KB or 3KB.


The biggest reason SL runs so slowly (10-20 FPS for most people vs. about 50-60FPS for typical video games) is because of poor texture size management. Most people's video cards can only handle a few hundred megabytes worth of textures before they choke, but the average scene in SL has texture loads in the gigabytes. Once your video card's texture memory is full, whatever remains goes into your system RAM, which is much slower than your video RAM. If your system RAM then gets full, whatever's left over goes into a swap file on your hard drive, which runs at glacial speeds. The result is you get a frame rate that's maybe 10-25% of what it should be (and so does everyone else).

This is the price we pay for being in a user-created world, instead of a professionally created world. The pros make it a point to optimize every texture for maximum performance. The average SL user doesn't have the first clue about that sort of thing.

For everyone's sake, keep those textures as small as possible. The rule of thumb I usually suggest to people is to keep about 80-85% of your textures at 256x256 or smaller, about 15-20% at 512x512, and about 5-10% at 1024x1024 or larger.



And don't fall into the trap of thinking you need large textures to preserve detail. As I often say, SL is better at blowing up small textures to full screen size than just about any program I've ever seen. Try this. Put a medium sized texture on a cube, say, a 256x256. Zoom in on that cube so it fills your screen. If your SL window is 1024 pixels wide, you're now viewing that texture at 16 times it's normal size. Notice it still looks pretty freakin crisp and sharp. SL's really, really good at that.

Again, keep those textures small. Only go big if you have fine print that would be illegible or other similarly important very tiny details in your image that would get lost at smaller sizes (which generally speaking, is not often).

... 256x256 image, a plasma storm in open GL with a native rendering of 256x256 (vs painting it) being streached over 1280x1024 pixels in SL

the quality you put also to make your texture greatly reduce the need of large files, a small but crisp texture will have the same effect as a large but smudged one

In SL, I can't imagine needing (or using) a texture bigger than 512x512.

Powers of 2 are good, but you don't always need textures to be squared.

Recently I did some spears. The spear heads were to have a 1:2 ratio. That is, twice as high as long. So, each spear head texture could be 256x512. Right? Right. However, making relatively small spear heads @ 256x512 is a bit much. I took the texture ratio down to 64x128. Four spear heads using that ratio. Then, just to be tricky, I put all 4 textures into one texture for a final texture of 256x128. One file with 4 textures at the proper ratio. Then it was just a matter of UV tweaks.

In some engines, dividing up texture space in such a manner is good. I don't know for sure if this is the case for SL, though. I think it is, but don't quote me on that.

In most game editors (I use GTK Radiant for editing on the quake 3 engine) it is noted that a texture is build in the power of 2.

(for the comon people, that is textures with sizes 2-4-8-16-32-64-128-256-512, etc. I wouldn't go further actually then 512, but hey, your choise)

And I see no reason why this aint a good idea for Second Life. It alligns out better your textures when you use them in game (at least, that is my experience)

It should help with download; a single file will probably compress more under JPEG2000 than four quarter sized files. I use this all the time, although it only makes sense if all the textures are in the one spot; usually on the same object. Otherwise 3/4 of the texture is wasted.

The benefit of smartly done texture maps, the four images on the same still small texture for the spear heads that Abu describes is that you load one texture for the spears. The whole head will (should) snap into focus from the grey at once.

It becomes a bit of a balancing act though... and one I don't know there is a single "right" answer for. I'm pretty sure Abu's situation (the final texture is only 256 X 128 so it should load pdq) mapping them together into one texture is the way to go. As the texture size climbs that may change, it may also change depending on the other textures that are being loaded. It's possible that one sim decorated entirely from one suitably offset and tweaked 2048 X 2048 would actually load blindingly quickly. Download one 16MB file and every prim surface is loaded... w00t! In a mainland sim with multiple owners, multiple textures etc. that might not work so well.

The rule of thumb still remains KISS though, this time it's Keep It Small, Stupid! I use in one place a sign that's four panels, from a 256 X 256 original. You can zoom right in on it and the edges of the do start to jaggy, but it's still readable filling the screen.

The 4 in 1 texture that I did is for one spot. That is, my spears are not intended for release into the wild (I'm planning on a one-time party). If I were to sell my spears and expect only one spear in a given place, then I would use 4 seperate textures, one for each spear.

This, of course, goes back to what Nep said. And El.

Isn't texturing fun?

When is the conversion of clothing textures done I would assume its done when I apply it to the avatar ?

When i do clohting i keep them at 256 times 256 pixels... it's still detailed, and isn't giving tomuch of size. Textures depends actually on the person who wants it. I have them packed in a 256x256 and 512x512, you can get them smaller or larger.

Use many 2048 x 2048s on large prims with a texture switching script and turn it transparent and slide the prims under the earth into their property. They won't know what hit them.

a favorite subject of mine... PLEASE MAKE YOUR MAXIMUM SIZE 512!!!

1024 sized textures take -FOUR TIMES- as long to download. if you're wearing an outfit with six layers (shirt/undershirt, pants/underpants, sock/shoes - and even more) from a designer who insists upon 1024 sized textures, the downloades to -everyone- take at least -four times- as long... if not longer!! est. 24-36x download time... :\

Yes, yes. I just wanted to emphasize one more time though, it's not just the downloads. Much more damaging is the amount of memory that large textures require. At 3-4MB a pop, it doesn't take a whole lot of 1024's to clog a 128MB video card, or even a 256. At 12-16MB, it only takes a handfull of 2048's.

There are certain circumstances under which large textures can be justified, but those circumstances are few and far between.



While you're certainly correct that textures should always be kept as small as possible, I believe your decription of the process for clothing is a little off. My understanding is that all the clothing and skin layers on the avatar get baked into a single 3-texture set (head, upper, lower) before anyone else sees them. Therefore, whether you're weraing an outfit with six components or you're completely naked, the amount of time it takes others to download your appearance won't change. Of course, the processing requirements to do the baking in the first place will increase with the amount and the size of the textures involved, slowing things down when you first get dressed, but once it's done, it's done.

As for whether or not the size of the clothing/skin textures affects the size of the final baked avatar appearance textures, there are arguments back and forth on that all the time. My personal feeling is that it does, but I don't have any concrete evidence of this. Many people are convinced that avatar textures always get sized to 512, no matter what. Sooner or later, I'm gonna have to do some testing, just to satisfy my own curiosity, but either way, the answer about what to do is the same. Always use 512 for avatar textures, just like the standard templates would have you do.

If the baked texture size is variable, then larger textures will lower everyone's FPS while providing at best a negligible increase in appearance quality. If it's not variable, then that means SL is downsizing your large textures during the baking process, and trust me, no matter how good SL might be at doing that, Photoshop will ALWAYS do a better job.

So, to summarize, always stick with 512 for avatar textures. For everything else, keep the vast majority 256x256 or smaller.

Not to mention that textures with a size superior to 512 X512 will create visual glitches on many clients, expecially if you plan to put your products for sale anything over 512 X512 will bring you MANY unsatisfied customers.

in my book DOWNLOADS are a null point, lets look at this for a second

ive been taking a wild guess saying that SL is using 70% qulaity (30% compression duh) this is just a wild eyeball guess, please dont hurt me

recently i did a thing on the forums where i took a 1024x1024 image and used normal jpg @ 70% quality, this came out to a filesize of 26kb

yes 26kb, this even on 28.8 dialup would only take about 10 seconds to transfer, course my train of thought says JPG2k is better, by how much im not really shure considering i dont know the exact compression ratio nor the voodoo LL did with their brand of J2K

so sending a large image over the internet from LL to you isnt really that big of a deal, infact most "loading" lag is waiting for the asset server to fetch the images (load up a uncashed 16x16 and a 1024x1024 at the same time, they will come in randomly not based on which was smaller)

now course once this 1024x1024 image hits your video card, it cant read jpg compression ect so it gets balloned back out to the full RAW size, resulting in poor computer performance, which besides making your SL experiance really crappy, SLOWS DOWN asset server request even more (becuase of the extra stress your computer is now dealing with it cant send them out quite as fast) and the process just snowballs

I think this can be confirmed with the texture intercept tool. The textures dumped out for avatar clothing is always a flat baked composite of all the clothes in 512 x 512 format.

I did quite a bit of testing when I first started SL.

Make a clothing document at 1024x1024 and save a tga then resize the psd to 512x512 and save a tga.
Upload both and apply to 2 identical garments you will see a quality difference between the 2 items, however its so very slight its not worth the extra file size

This is called a 'Texture Atlas', and is used for game optimization. It's generally good as it saves renderer context switching. One thing you may have to be careful of is bleeding between textures from mipmapping, but this generally isn't noticable.

Sorry to gravedig, but my builds usually involve robots or other mechanical things. I personally approve of making all of the different metal textures (And whatnot) for the avatar or build 128x128 squares that are all uploaded on one 512x512, like the spearheads. It's not like any of the prims that need the textures are ever going to load by themselves.

Just had to reply & say I love your name, Wonder Twin.

I've heard about the avatar textures always being converted to 512*512 somewhere and was wondering how it works. Could someone elaborate (or speculate from experienced point of view) a bit more on this so that I can convince my friend who firmly believes "the bigger, the better"? When does this conversion occur and how?


I think I have this glitch . When the textures are bigger than 512, skins/clothes often remain blurry no matter how long I wait. I have a feeling it depends on the amount of textures in surrounding area and perhaps uncleared cache, and just maybeeee video RAM too (because it never happens on the computer I use at work). Could this be attributed to the conversion gone wrong?

BTW when this happened with one of my favourite dress, I IMed the designer. He thanked me for letting him know and happily redid all the textures for me immediately. He earned one happy and loyal customer