You: Hey baby, my Texture is 512x768. Reply: No it's only 512x512!

Hey All!

Dose anyone else have a problem uploading textures larger than 512x512? I have uploaded a 512x768 and it keeps resizing to 512x512, this is really irritating, I have used the RC2 and the regular Second Life viewer.

I post this here for hopefully quick reply, if there are multiple reports of people having this problem I will fill out the Jira!

Can textures be uploaded in non-powers of 2 now? I may be out of the loop on this one, but it used to be that odd-sized textures would be upconverted to the next power of 2.

I have been able to Upload 256x768 before, so non power of 2 texture have been used before...

Hrm... I did a little more digging. Check this out... its a sticky in the Texture forum here:

/109/e6/150360/1.html

According to this document stickied in the texturing forums you are limited to powers of 2. And I'm pretty sure it has always been that way.

/109/e6/150360/1.html

Ah hah! I have read that very forum thread multiple times before, in my head I keep thinking 768 is a power or 2, but that is not true.. I keep thinking in block size, so I am thrown off. Now to retreat to my cove of "Wow I should have known that!" I swear have uploaded a 512 x 768 before, odd texture size I know.

Possibly because you know 1024 is allowed, and there's that subliminal message in the brain that links 1024 with 768 as a standard desktop wallpaper resolution?

the best way to deal with this is:

resize the texture to the next highest allowed size and make a note of the aspect ratio..

so resize your 512 x 768 photo to 512 x 1024 before you upload it
once you upload it and put it on a square prim, it will look funny because one direction of the picture will now be taller or wider than it was supposed to be.

to fix that is simple.. resize the prim to match the original aspect ratio which is .66666 to 1

so you make a prim that is 6.666M wide and 10M tall which will then match your original pic
then resize it to the actual size you want.. of course you can do the math first and make it the right size before putting the texture.

it is always better to upsize odd size pics than to downsize because when you downsize and then try to make it larger, you will lose quality.


I hope this made sense..

I'm not sure about non-powers of 2, but a while back, I had uploaded the skin of my av in a resolution like 2048x2048 or somthing, and some time later they changed the maximum resolution size allowed and now my nipples are blurry :/

Vaguely related ... I came across some textures which are 1024 x 2048, which I didn't think was possible. Were textures this big allowed once upon a time?

ETA: Ah, thanks Tigro, you answered my question while I was posting.

didn't all the bigger textures got automaticly downsized? or you mean you saw textures with such a resolution a while back, but don't know what is their current resolution?

They are in my inventory now, and when opened, they say they are 2048 wide.

wow, interesting... I woudl ike to nkow more about that, I wonder if there is any holes currently that allows the upload of bigger images...

are they textures it won't be an issue if you send me full perms copies of them?

On their way in a few mins.

ETA: I have sent you a couple - I have rather a lot of these. They are quite nice panoramic sky pics, but too big to be practical really.

Baked textures will always be 512x512 so anything larger than that is just unncessary and leaves the resizing up to the client rather than you.

I have textures that are 2048 in size, these are old textures when I believe importing this size wasn't restricted, it is now.

According to the Wiki - these are the sizes and aspect ratios to use.

Search > All for "Classifieds", "People", and "Places" - 4:3 (256x192 pixels)
Search > Places and Classified tabs - ~7:5 (398x282 pixels)
Search > Land tab - ~7:5 (358x252 pixels)
Profile > 2nd Life tab - ~4:3 (178x133 pixels)
Profile > Picks tab - ~16:9 (288x162 pixels)
Profile > 1st Life tab - 1:1 (133x133 pixels)
Profile > Classifieds tab - ~3:2 (206x137 pixels)
Profile > Web tab - 1:1 (400x400 pixels) Note Scrollbars will eat 15 pixels
About Land > Options tab - ~3:2 (178x117 pixels)
Group Information > General tab's "Group Insignia" - 1:1 (126x126 pixels)

Those are the sizes that you should create and save the image as. When it uploads, it will still do the rounding to the standard sizes specified in previous posts -- and therefore look somewhat odd when just viewed as a texture. However, when you select the texture as a Profile picture or Group picture or others, it will then resize again for the designated window and therefore look proper.

I can't login to check right now, but are you saying that my textures kept the original resolution and are only blurred cause of the baking?

do you know if the server would accept higher-res baked textures if the client provides them, and if other clients would render them properly?

Hi Kitty,

What is a "Baked texture"?

Thanks,

Doug

in this context it means all the layers of clothes and skin "flattened" together and saved as a single texture
edit: except when you're editing your av's appearance, that is usually the actual texture applied to the av mesh, whenever you change something on your av clothing or skin (either by editing it or just wearing a different thing), the client process all the layers again and uploads the baked texture to the sim you're in

That's the difference between that actual graphic and how it will be used. As a personal rule, design your texture/graphic in whatever ratio it will end up in and use a reasonably high resolution. Then follow up by shrinking the graphic to the next power of 2, ignore the aspect ratio for the file itself, and save a copy as a TGA/PNG for the upload. The aspect ratio will be worked out in application regardless of the source image, either by prim or by image frame. (^_^)

SL's image conversion is very very bad, so when you try to upload something that's not a power of 2, the image WILL get ruined compared to the smarter resizing that's available in GIMP, PS, PSP. (^_^)

I almost always upload 512x512. But to use a 4:3 end result as an example, I do the following. I create the image at 2000x1500 resolution and work out the whole image. Then I re-scale it to 512x512 and "Maintain Aspect Ratio" turned off. =^-^=

Other rules I follow... (>_>

**If it's meant for any of profile tabs I scale it to 512x512.

**If it's meant for a prim face smaller than 0.5m in any dimension, I scale that dimension to 256

**If it's meant for a prim face smaller than 2.5m in any dimension I scale that dimension to 512.

**Anything larger, or offset multiples per texture, I scale that dimension to 1024.

**Finally... If it's a skin/clothing texture, I upload at 512x512 only. Until someone can prove that baking is done at a higher resolution, I see no purpose for going higher.

(^_^)y

In case anyone's wondering, let me chime in on the 2048 question. For most of SL's history, 1024x1024 was the largest allowable size. For a brief period, LL upped the limit to 2048x2048, but that didn't last long. They quickly lowered it back down to 1024x1024 when it became clear that the 2048's were causing certain graphics cards to crash. Not all graphics cards can handle such large images.

All 2048's that were already in-world at the time were supposed to have been automagically downsized to 1024. If any are still reading as 2048, I'd be curious to know if it's just a mistake in the readout numbers or if they really did get skipped over in the global downsizing. Two things I'd want to know: 1. What happens if you apply one of those textures to a prim and examine it via the texture console or with ctrl-alt-shift-T? 2. What happens if you download one and open it in an image editor?




As for the oddball sizes that PeterPan mentioned, chalk that one up to ridiculously poor planning on the part of LL's GUI people. The only explanation I can think of for why those sizes are as they are is that whoever was hired to create those parts of the (2D) GUI had no understanding of 3D graphics. It seems not to have occurred to the person(s) that it makes absolutely no sense to incorporate arbitrary image sizes that the system itself is incapable of importing and utilizing. My guess is they probably had a Web designer doing that part of the work way back when, and that that person had little if any contact with the rest of the graphics department.

There's no good way to get texture-sized images to work for those odd-sized panels. The best thing to do is what a few people have already suggested. Create the image at some multiple of its actual intended in-GUI size, and then just before you upload it, downsize it to the nearest powers of two. For example, if you're creating a Search -> Calssifieds image, which will display at 256x192, create it first at 512x384, and then donwsize it to 256x256 before you upload it. That way, when SL squeezes it to fit into the 256x192 window pane, it will look as close to correct as possible. If you try to go the other way, starting with 256x192 and upsizing to 256x256 for upload, you'll end up with more blur than you would the first way. Downsizing is always better than upsizing, and using a dedicated image editor like Photoshop, PSP, or GIMP to do it is always better than letting SL do it itself.

That's interesting. I did try to download one once but I crashed. I can't get inworld just now to try the other thing but I will tomorrow, and will send you a couple.

*points to TigroSpottystripes' answer as well*

Each avie consists of 5 baked textures: head, upper body, lower body, eyes and skirt.

Eyes and skirt are obvious where they originate from.

Your skin will consist of three textures to be applied to the three major parts so head comes directly from your skin (not entirely accurate since it's actually composite as well but for simplicity's sake it doesn't really matter).

Upper/lower body are a composite that depends on which layers you're wearing (I'll likely get the exact ordering wrong but it's just illustrative) and it's composited from left to right.

Upper body: base + upper body skin + undershirt + shirt + gloves + upper jacket

Lower body: base + lower body skin + underpants + socks + pants + lower jacket

The end result of the "composite" is what the 'baked texture' represents.

When you change clothes (or log in) your viewer will download all the different textures for all the different layers you're wearing and then upload 5 (baked) textures up to the sim.

Whenever you see someone your viewer will simply download those 5 textures and apply them to their shape instead of having to constantly composite for everyone on the fly.