Textures are blurry and fuzzy

I have uploaded probably around 100 textures at near 600X600 resolution using .bmp files. Up until now, they looked great on a 10mX10m square prim. Now they're all blurry unless I tile them. They're clear as long as I'm in the editing mode using the target circle for sizing but as soon as I close the editing function, the texture becomes fuzzy and blurry beyond recognition. I have not changed my video card or messed with it in any way. What's going on?

Peter

I have the same posting in the Tech Forum, sure am in need of an explanation or resolution. Thx.

If you move away from or towards the object, or zoom in or change your angle to the object, does it sometimes get better?

If so, it sounds like a mipmap problem. Video cards (or software, or whatever) compute a number of smaller versions of textures, and use these smaller textures on objects that are further away to save bandwidth and improve performance. It could be that a smaller (lower resolution) mipmap is being shown when the larger one is being used.

It could also be that I am talking right out of my fundament and have no idea what's going on, in which case I'm sure someone will jump in to correct me.

Try using textures that are powers of 2 in dimension, i.e 256x256 or 512x512, this might help.

Normal texture resolution for most games is 512x512. While SL accepts textures up to 2048x2048 there is some point after which your textures will be resized, losing quality. I dont think its as low as 600x600 but you never know. Maybe they are just rounded to the nearest power of 2?

I think images with dimensions that are powers of 2 are significantly clearer than those that aren't. I'm pretty sure images are resized to a power of 2 before they are uploaded.

Yes, images are resized to the nearest (lower?) power of two. For 600x600, that means 512x512. If you have your texture detail set low, it may explain why you're not viewing them clearly. Also, if you have a lot of fine detail, it may have become obscured by either the texture resizing process, or SL's texture blending system. You can set your texture detail to maximum in the configuration menu.

However, it's more likely to be a mipmapping error, I agree.

Thanks, almost lost me Wednesday but I see your point. Seems the further I move away, the fuzzier it gets and I remember just the opposite, not long ago where you had to back up to get a clearer image.
Yes Catherine but even a 512X512 used to be as clear as a bell ( with minor detail loss ) as you mentioned.
It's too bad we can't recheck the image resolution once it's uploaded.
Now here's the kicker, when all this happened, I was into the game about 5 minutes, got off and posted this. Got back on, stayed on for about an hour and the texures became clearer as time went on, seems almost the way I remember it.
Good info from all
Thanks for taking the time
Feel better now

Peter

I think the client takes time to download the full texture detail, so if you blip around a lot, it does not fully download, but once it does, I believe it keeps at least part of it in cache. At least this is the experience I have from uploading huge textures (Eggy: SL will allow much larger than 2048x2048.. For my converted mpeg video, each quadrant of it is a 2560x3456 picture...)

My rule of thumb for texture sizes is:
if you are not going to get really close up to a texture, or I'm going to be repeating/tiling the texture alot on a prim, I use a small one so it downloads to clients as quickly as possible - I've gone as small as 64x64 for some textures.

I never go larger than 512x512 for two reasons:
1) it takes longer to download to clients, and
2) there's bound to be a significant amount of users with videocards that can't handle larger than 512x512, and some may not handle textures larger than 256x256 - AFAIK some texture processing occurs (on the client's end) when these cards are presented with textures too big for them to handle.

I'll obviously break the above rule if I want to do a good quality animating texture (rules are made to be broken lol)

Another tip is to re-use textures as much as possible - as long as it doesnt make your build look crap
A few times I have combined multiple textures into one texture, and adjusted the mapping coords on the prim to show the relevant area... again, it saves extra streaming.

Sorry if I'm preaching to the already-knows!