Stupid Texture Tricks

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DAMN BOY!

Nice work. What did you use to generate the textures? And if you say photoshop Ima gonna slap you.

3ds Max with the V-Ray Advanced renderer

Well unbelievable talent, Chip. Thanks for sharing that!!

Thanks Aimee! I would love to be able to bake full builds, but the texture lag would be crushing. It's also difficult to translate anything complex from max to SL. You've done an awesome job with your builds incorporating shadowing without making it a lag pit.

I've never used 3D max or any of those, what does texture "baking" refer too? Adding light and shadows to the textures?

I suspect it means creating the textures to apply to the prims so they look like they're reflecting or shaded. If shiny prims in SL really reflect what was around them, the first example would be easy to do. SL would also require quad terahertz processors.

I like the reflecting setup, but I think the shaded one is beautiful. My earlier comment notwithstanding, processor speeds will continue to rise and video cards will continue to get more powerful. Someday it will be possible for a sysem like SL to feature realtime lighting and reflections, 10000-triangle avatars, arbitrary prims (imagine a NURBS prim), realistic physics, spatial material-dependent sound, and so on. Add VR and we'd never leave.

Chip, are these on display anywhere in world? I'd love to see them in person.

Fractal, I dream of those days! I'm really blown away with the 3rd generation Doom and Unreal engines. If SL supported normals mapping I think I'd wet my pants, hehe. These are on display next to my store in Freelon I'm baking the textures for another one now which should be up later in the day, unless I get sidetracked.

Ingrid, texture baking is just as Fractal described it. Basically it's a matter of creating something in a 3d animation and rendering program that can be easily recreated in SL and using the texturing and lighting tools to create a realistic look. Those advanced effects (reflections, refractions, caustics, shadows, sub-surface scattering, etc) are then rendered directly into a texture ("baked" for each object that can then be applied to the objects in SL.

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Sure miss Jimmy

Yeah, Jimmy's work is completely mindblowing. Is he not around anymore?

I've been playing with textures lately, so I have a question of my own. What resolution are those textures, and how viable is it to "bake" them into one image map?

That seems to be a key lag reducer from the work I've done. This sort of thing reminds me that I still have Blender installed on my machine, despite the amount of time I'm spending in SL proper.

As for getting SL to the point where it can do all these nice rendering tricks, it's getting there. In the meantime, though, little tricks like this are quite fun.

Sorry, I didn't understand the question? Could you try rephrasing?

Re: Is it possible to get that level of quality with a single 1024 x 1024 texture, for example? And how large in general does the resolution need to be?

I ask because I've been toying with varying degrees of texture detail of late, and I'm under the impression that cramming it all into one texture (or lower size) saves bandwidth.

Oh, you mean make one texture map and use parts of it to texture differing parts of a structure?

I don't recommend it.

First, just one 1024 texture, regardless of how much of it you use for a face, seems to slow down the renderer badly in the FPS catagory.

Second, It's just not worth it, really, in terms of trouble vs. gain... I use it for console buttons at really small resolutions, but otherwise...

Combining multiple texture into one image can help some but it still comes down to raw pixel dimensions and complexity of the image. I wish we could tell how many kb a texture winds up after it's converted to jpg2000. For anything large scale this is still pretty impractical and you'd end up needing to fake most of it by reusing textures as many places as possible rather than having a unique texture for each surface. We can dream though

I also find that photorealistic builds seem a bit jarring because the shading on our avatars is so simplistic. If you stand inside the one with the pipes it looks like your av is glowing hehehe,
Jimmy Thompson managed to do some really spectacular stuff with Sim Horror, and Neph and Neil did some beautiful stuff for the Whitestar using these kinds of techniques. I'm not sure what all they did to optimize. I've only just started experimenting with baking build textures.

I'm not sure I agree here - I think Chip's assessment is more valid. I'm using a 1024 x 1024 for a series of animations and low-res console utilities in Game Dev 3 right now, and don't notice any slowdown. Of course, this is because I've made sure half the sim is minimalist.

As for baking in general - like I said, it's getting there. This is all very interesting stuff in its own way... I just kinda wish light and shadow were easier on the data stream.

Since I still have plans to script some building tools for SL in Blender, this interests me in the vein of "stuff to look out for or add" when it comes time for me to sit down and write it.

I've been playing with baking for avs - finding the lighting next to impossible though.

my idea would be to make the shadow rendering on a separate map (wich is pretty easy in max) and save them at a low resolution, like 256x256 in alpha, then use it as an extra primon the wall that would hold the unlit texture, make sense for me

maybe thats the way i should make my "latex room"...

for V ray, its a pretty slow renderer, i ma not sure it would be necessary for non reflective surfaces (to my opinion reflection would look ok as long as you arent moving)

Actually Vray is blazingly fast. I love it. It kicks the pants off Mental Ray in terms of speed and options. The only thing it lacks is a shader language. I'm not sure how much you'd gain in texture load savings by doing shadow images seperately. Having every prim encased with an alpha texture would be a frame rate killer, and you'd still need an individual shadow map for every surface in addition to the diffuse texture. It would probably end up about the same with the added burden of alpha. Worth a try though