Relationships

Chosen, when I say, in context of SL, I mean the relative relevance of all this in the context of an inworld environment as compared to a more picky professional environment which you are obviously heavily involved in. This is akin to a real world architect persistently trying to feed people information which he or she is obviously expert at regarding how people should contruct their buildings 'correctly' in SL.

Secondly, while something like JPG compression obviously does reduce quality, it won't kill anyone looking at it unless you deliberately save it a few hundred times. People do have a choice given to them. And if one opts TGA while sacrificing practical reasons of size (in your hard disk) and viewability, by all means, go for it. There is no harm.

Plus, whats more damaging to textures is the resampling being done to make it conform to the power of 2 sizes (128, 256, 512 etc.). The stretching being done here causes more loss than the JPG compression does. I'm sure you have mentioned something about this in some earlier posts somewhere.

For those who are not yet aware of this, all odd size textures are 'squashed and stretched' to fit into the nearest power of 2 size regardless of format, so a texture that is 135 x 500 for example will be shoved into a box that is 128 x 512 before being uploaded. The reasoning behind this, I believe is the way the OpenGL algorithm loads bits of the texture into the graphics card memory. Since memory is allocated in powers of 2, these are allocated out in chunks or 'buckets' of a certain size. The textures are loaded into memory in these sizes for efficient use of graphics RAM. If not, you'd get buckets which are not fully occupied. If you use the SL 'save texture as' function, you will get back this resized file and not the original one you uploaded. But all we have to remember is, we can pad or start off with these sizes just to be safe.

Regarding the economics of compression, read my sentence again.

And finally, for those who are newer to SL texturing and building, try not to get too analytical over these things. At least until you learn to create things of decent appreciability, all this isn't going to do you much good or make your builds godly.

Your analogy is quite flawed. You're correct that the principles of RL architecture don't necessarily apply in a simulated environment like SL, but you're absolutely incorrect that the common principles behind manufacturing the elements of that simulation don't apply. An environment like SL is precisely what all this texturing and modeling training is for. It's not what architectural training is for (although someone with skills in architecture usually will do better at it than someone without).

If you want to go ahead and create a virtual world based on solids modeling, then your analogy would be suitable (although it would be incorrect). However, since SL is made of surface models, your logic just doesn't hold up.

In a world made of nothing more than textured surfaces, knowledge and understanding of the principles and standards of texturing is of paramount importance. I don't know how I can be any plainer about that.

It's not a question of being "picky" as you put it. It's about helping people develop habits that will propel them forward in whatever they end up doing, now and in the future.


First, I never said it would kill anyone. Of course I realize you're being facetious, but let's keep it real, shall we?

Second, there is "harm". The harm is that the images won't look as good as they could. Let me turn that around and ask you, what would be the harm in following long established principles and guidelines in order to ensure the best possible chance of success in SL and in all 3D modeled environments? I can't think of any, other than perhaps a slight blow to the ego of one who's been fighting hard to claim that such principles are worthless.

As for hard drive space, that argument is nonsensical for three reasons. First and most obviously, storage space is sooooooo cheap and so easy to come by that it's practically an unlimited resource. One CD will hold 175-230 TGA's at 1024x1024, depending on whether they're 24 or 32 bit. At 512x512, that's about 700-900 that will fit, or at 256x256 it's about 2700-3600.

If you follow the sizing rule of thumb and you keep 75% of your textures at 256, 20% at 512, and 5% at 1024, that's an average of about 2000 textures per CD, and they cost 35 cents. Buy a hundred pack for $35 and you've got enough for 200,000 images. If you worked 8 hours a day, producing one texture every 20 minutes, you'd fill the whole pack in just under 23 years. If you don't like CD's you can get a 250 GB hard drive for $70 and spend the next 82 years filling it with textures.

Second, as I've said before, if someone's more concerned about space than they are about quality, then, respectfully, they really shouldn't be a digital artist. That's equally true whether it's a hobby or a profession, especially inlight of what I just said about the amount of space per texture we're talking about.

Third, if the first two don't settle the issue to your satisfaction and you're really that concerned about your storage space, it's simple enough to just delete each texture from your local machine after it's been uploaded to SL.


All true, but a bit off topic from our discussion. Since you brought it up though, yes, all textures should be created with pixels per side in the powers of two (32, 64, 128, 256, 512, or 1024). That's one of those universal principles I was referring to earlier. It's not just an SL thing. The only SL-specific part is you can't use anything smaller than 32 or bigger than 1024 in SL.


I have and it reads exactly the same as it did the first time. All appearances are that when you said it, you missed the point that JP2's are equally "economical" whether they're sourced from JPEG's or TGA's. The only difference is the ones sourced from JPEG's look worse than the ones sourced from TGA's. Therefore, once again, using a JPEG as your source means deliberately sacrificing quality without getting any benefit whatsoever in return. I fail to see how doing that makes any kind of sense.


I don't know why you're so allergic to allowing people to learn things that will help them not only in SL, but also in ANY 3D modeling environment they might ever choose to enter, but I really wish you'd cut it out. You've made several comments now that established principles and common practices are nothing more than "theories" to be easily dismissed, rather than fact, and now you're saying that learning them "won't do you much good". Do you even realize how potentially damaging you're being to someone who might be trying to learn this for the first time?

You're being like that kid in elementary math class who stands up and shouts "No, it's five!" every time the teacher says 2+2=4. Most other students just dismiss it, but every so often there's one or two whose learning is seriously impaired by the distraction and by the challenge to the legitimacy of the established facts. That's such an unfair thing to do.

Now, you might say, well that's math and this is art, and since art is more subjective than math, established facts aren't so important. I would submit that the opposite is true. It's precisely because art is subjective that guiding principles must be learned and treasured. Just as Newton could not have created calculus without a mastery of already existing mathmatical principles, good artists cannot fully maximize their potential without good training in the existing principles of their field. That's why art teachers have jobs, just like math teachers.

Also, something you should probably be made aware of is that it actually takes more chemical reactions in the brain to unlearn something than to learn. If I remember correctly, I think it's something on the order of 27 times more. That's why old habits are so hard to break. It's physiologically very, very difficult for the brain to rewrite something it's already written. So, when you tell someone, "Don't worry about what the standards might be outside SL," you're setting them up for frustration, difficulty, and hadicap later if they ever dicide to branch out. Again, that's unfair, and it's not something I feel I can just stand by and watch. As long as I'm here, I'll do everthing in my power to help people learn good habits the first time around so that they can have the best possible experience with all their endeavors inside SL and out.

So I encourage you to let go of this notion that standards of practice aren't important. They are, and all you're doing by not accepting that is holding yourself back. If you want to do that to yourself, I can't stop you, but I am asking that you please stop trying to talk others out of learning the things they come here to learn.

Oh, believe me, I have photoshop, hehe. It's what I used to take my 2832x2832 exported jpeg from InDesign and downsample it to a more possibly uploadable 1024x1024 texture - the results of which are actually surprisingly sharp, but it of course would have been nicer to have been able to export a lossless format from InDesign, and THEN downsample it in photoshop. There's a very specific reason I was using InDesign. ;D

I think I've been doing something stupid though. I could probably open up a different, lossless exported format in Photoshop. XD

Yes. My fault. I should have said "isn't necessarily lossy", though SL's implementation may very well be.

Ah, let me try this quoting thing. Hope it works.




You are right here. SL objects are surface models, similar to those used for subdivision and nurbs surface modeling. It is far from being parametric objects.



Yes I agree totally. Principles of colour, balance, proportion, aesthetics are of minimal importance compared to crisp and lossless images of impeccable quality.



Again, I agree. Do not ever stray from proven habits. It will result in creativity.



There is no harm. Once you learn a new skill, you free yourself a little to experiment on other less tried and tested methods which some might be even considered 'bad' practice.




I have no ego. Just like you. Thats why we are both here.




Yup. So true. I also enjoy waiting for my thumbnails to load.




This was in reference to JPG2000 being imposed on us regardless of what source we use. It is a matter of economics. But I guess you're right. If you start off as a virgin and you get devirginized, you're more a virgin at the end of it as compared to a non virgin that went through the same devirginizing process.



Yes I am damaging. I only believe in teaching people what they need to learn in an incremental, not exactly linear manner, when it actually helps them the most. The initial question was what was the relationship between resolution and size, etc. and had nothing to do with whats the best format to use. Replying to me here to my two sentence quirp, knowing that I can cause this kind of damage is also fruitless.



I'm sure it takes ages to unlearn how to not select 'save as JPG'.





My intention here wasn't to stop others from learning. I only came here to reply to the question about resolution relationships. And subsequently I only quirped about the all sweeping sentence above. Seifert Surface answered this very clearly and succinctly in a simple language any newbie could understand. Nothing more, nothing less. This is one of the qualities of an excellent teacher. What I am distinctly against are pedants which administer plain set rules, which can actually hinder learning more than I ever could cause damage here (people will absorb knowledge regardless of what I say anyway, they aren't kids). Here is a definition of a pedant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedant

For the benefit of everyone, I will stop replying to this post now as it only generates more counter arguments from the 'willing teacher'.

The rest of the post has been ignored since it was sarcastic and rude. I'm glad for this one sentance though.