Creating art

I've managed to creat a painting by adding a texture to a simple object. Iut I notice that resolution is not great. What is the ideal size and resolution for a .tga to be imported as a texture? I created a 72dpi image that is 200x163 pixels in photoshop, but when I applied the texture to an object, it became very blurry.

Thanks for the help.

The resolution will always be 72 dpi, because that is your screen resolution. 512 x 512 is a resonable size for an image, but larger than than tends to become laggy.

I've heard that powers of 2 are best for figure dimesions, but I haven't confirmed this.

Experiment with resizing your painting (the prim) and see if that clears up the image.

A rule-of-thumb for 3d textures is that size of the texture file itself (in pixels) should not exceed the size the object will likely occupy on the screen. The problem with that is that in SL you can get really really close to any object by moving the camera position. So, theoretically the object with the texture could very well exceed the screen size and according to this logic would require you to make huge image files. 512x512 pixels seems like a reasonably good resolution for pretty much every purpose. To cut down on file size (and therefore download time and lag) you could also save the texture in jpg format instead of tga, unless you need an alpha channel (i.e. transparency) in it. Actually, I'm not sure if file format would really matter, or whether all textures get internally transformed into a single format anyways.

Also, when looking at the texture inside SL, it somtimes takes a while until it's fully streamed to your client, so it might look blurry for a while, but the size you mentioned is certainly pretty small.