Texture Sheeting

I've been working on a system to produce more realistic textures in Second Life. I'm able to extract geometry from SecondLife, import it into Lightwave, texture it then bake the result to a texture sheet using Evasion3D's Microwave plugin. The geometry needs a fair amount of cleanup but I'm able to get some fairly impressive results.

The problem I am facing is getting the results back into Second Life. Using Candide LeMay's uber-sparkly Photoshop script. I'm able to determine the correct repeats-per-face and offset but when I enter the values into the texture window, SL mangles them. As an example, I need a vertical offset of 0.587, SL will accept the value but when I come back to it a moment later it's been rounded upto 0.590.

I just wondered if anybody else had encountered similar behaviour and had found a suitable workaround.

SL's rounding for texture placement is pretty terrible, especially if you're using planar mapping. The only workaround I know of is just to build in such a way so as not to need numbers that won't work. It takes a bit of planning, but you can avoid problematic numbers without too much trouble.

It's kind of like alpha sorting in that it's just something we have to live with and be careful to avoid.

the random floats issue has pleuged SL for a while now

basicly what happens is a mathmatic error with rounding exact measurments (that gets kinda deep maby someone will pop up and fill in the blanks)

this happens in almost all computer programs

with SL as of recently, it has major issues, almost like its rounding all the numbers instead of "to the closest point", its annoying as hell, it makes simple tasks tedious, and you cannot always get a quality result

ive been personally hounding the lindens to fix this ever since it showed up, but we got a load of new features instead ... (im gonna stop before i go on a rant)

one way around it is to set the textures via script, this is alot more accurate than the edit window but the problem is soon as you edit your object again the edit system sorta takes over and your back @ square one ...

another way is to make shure your textures have abit of wiggle room, theres going to be some degree of error anyways

another thing ive noticed, if you punch in numbers (in the texture tab) from the top down it loves to goof your numbers (ie enter x and then y x will change) whereas if you go from the bottom up it seems to stick abit better

Thanks guys, that's pretty much what I suspected.

I've found a number of inconsistencies in the way the edit window works, including the 'bottom up' approach suggested by Osgeld and different behaviour when tabbing between fields, hitting Return and hitting Enter on the numeric pad. By their very nature, none of the inconsistencies are consistent enough to be relied upon as a work around.

I've had a little success by adding 'wiggle room' or rather, extending the image a couple of pixels beyond the polygon edges. This is OK but makes seamless edges just that little bit harder.

I know the chaps at the Lab have a lot on right now but I'll submit a bug report. Maybe if they see it's affecting enough people it'll help bump it up the list of priorities. In the meantime, let's see what I can get done through scripting.

Thanks again.