Research of how to improve SL visual quality

This would be so fabulous.


Wow, Jimmy that is a beautifully realized build. Excellent excellent excellent, it looks GREAT

nice looking work Jimmy. just curious, doesn't this make your textures less reusable though?

on the texture quality subject, my place is made almost entirely from 10x10 prims but i used 256x256 textures and it looks great! loads fast too. it helps to sharpen them a smidge with an unsharp mask (50%) before you save them but i find "smaller" textures like that work just fine and no one's computer commits suicide.

most of the textures are repeated either 1x1 or 1xMultiple on my build. down with 1024x1024 textures and slightly down with 512x512! especially on small builds.

Thx Nephilaine, I really appreciate the compliment from you. Im folliwing the work of your team in Chartreuse since the beggining (first the White Casino was a big plywood box!). When I go back to the main land I visit Chartreuse to see your new build. Last time was a very cool water pump system!



For your question, yes, its make the texture less reusable, but Im not using the 'generic' workflow where we create a wood structure and apply texture in a second step. I do my texture before my structure. Maybe I should make a tutorial about the way I work because I never saw someone else using this technique. You guys would be interested by this kind of tutorial?

About texture quality, I never try about increasing the sharpnest before saving my texture, thx for the trick, I'll give it a try for sure.

Yes, Jimmy. I think any tutorial you, or any other creator, can put together is a valuable asset to our community.

Thanks for everyone that contributed to this thread. I believe that sharing knowledge is a the most effective way to allow our world to reach a new level of visual quality.

The project Sim Horror is now almost over so I decided to release to the public an example of the source files that was use to create the haunted house. The original image was 1024x1024 and more than 20MB, so I had to reduce the size and remove layers to have a reasonable size (1.2MB). All you need is a recent version of Adobe Photoshop to open the source file.

Sample of the images (SH_int_wall_002-Public_release.jpg)

Source file 1.2MB (zip archive containing the .psd file)

Important Note : For educationnal purpose only, turn on/off the layers to see the different possibilities.

Can someone also explain me why textures are unsharp if you don't make the sizes a power of 2 ?

Because images get resized to the nearest power of 2 before being uploaded. 2x2, 4x4, 8x8, 16x16, yadda yadda, 128x128, 256x256, and so on. 512x512 is getting a bit large though.

they don't have to be square though. so like 128x256 or 16x512 should be fine.

i have problems with small textures like 64x64 or smaller staying blurry and not really loading all the way unless you "touch" the object. anyone got a clue about that?