Textures - How do they work?!

So I was just reading the old forums again, as I do sometimes...
As I've been starting putting some textures together to sell to content creators I was interested in what size to make them, it's a topic I've read many times but saught some kind of wisdom from these non-inky pages.

Heres the interesting thing - Big textures are often villafied in secondlife, some stores going as far as to ban merchants who use larger textures in order to try and keep their loading times down. But it's more how they are used than anything else.

Although it might take slightly longer to download, it's actually faster for peoples computers if the shop owner were to put 4 of their textures onto a 1024x texture. Once it's downloaded the graphics card is only needing to handle the one file, and if this were spread over a build there could be marked increases in performance.

For clothes and the like I've long been sticking to trying to keep the texture contextual, as I like to 'fakebake' shadows in, sometimes multiple textures are required where they might not otherwise but as long as the dimensions of the uploaded texture are kept fairly small it's not so bad.

Just remember, TGA's aren't your enemy. There's no need to save anything as a JPG when uploading to secondlife. Although it looks smaller when on your computer, how secondlife handles the textures is completely different. LindenLabs grid at least uses JPG2000, anything you upload regardless of source is converted into this, so if you save your file as a JPG it will end up being compressed twice, leaving your textures over compressed while probably not actually gaining any performance increase. Your better making that file's dimensions smaller, and not attempting to compress it.

The lack of understanding of textures is one of the biggest performance drains in secondlife, and something that every content creator should spend some time investigating for themselves. I'm sure I don't know everything I need to know, and a lot of it is theory and trial and error, but being actively aware of it could make our secondlife a little faster for everyone! :3

Sculpt wierdness in Imprudence / Inworldz (And Secondlife Too)

Mostly I've only been noticing this in Inworldz as I'm doing more 'new' building there, but I've seen it in rezzing items in Secondlife too - though I may have an idea as to why now, but it's purely speculation untill I've done more testing...

The problem is this:

As you can see the sculpt map is corrupting (This was working, fine for months, untill I logged in today and noticed it had done this.) I've had it happen many times with other sculpts, and have read that it seems to be an encryption error to do with pre viewer 2 type viewers when handling abnormally shaped Sculpt maps, for precision sculpting this is a pain.
I'm wondering if it's to do with where the sculpt maps are stored, and I'm going to experiment a little with it. As I noticed the belt end sculpt map was in my trash for some reason, I've restored it and hope this fixes it, though of course with the way things are cashed in secondlife this shouldn't actually matter, especially as that wouldn't help those who had bought items and had the same problem.
I assume it's a fetching issue, where it's not loading, either way I wish it wouldn't keep doing it! :3

Edit: I remember a 'quick fix' for this, that Suki reminded me of. Rezise maps to square. It seems to solve the problem, I'll keep an eye on it :)

Extra Blog and General News

I finished my photo-base and as such started working overtime on putting together skins based on my concept for SidheStruck, there are now two shops in InWorldz and in Secondlife, and I've made an extra blog about it ~ http://sidhestruck.blogspot.com/

When I make my next photo texture - Which is bound to happen, I'll document it and give some suggestions on how to go about it yourself. I would say that this first project has taken months, especially as I'm very fussy! :D

I'm also currently playing with scripts in order to make some accessories for the skins, especially for Inworldz where there isent quite as much of a back catalouge of 'bits' for people to use.
I'm thinking especially to start, some ears perhaps... And an Orc set has been bouncing in my head this week, with a shape and teeth... Well we'll see :3

A Tip Painting Skins in CS4(Extended) - Them annoying thigh seams...

So you worked out how to use your tools, got the mesh sitting there and have painted yourself a skin/ensumble now you want to edit the thighs of the skin (More relevant for skins I feel than clothes, but it's annoyed me there too)
You can't get there! Photoshop CS4 is great but I find it really hard to get at these hidden seams, I couldent find a option for fixing it in CS4(Maybe there is, but well...) I went the long way around and opened up blender.

Opening up the avatar.blend (A version of which can be found at primstars website.) And deleted all the unncessary doodahs, in fact deleted everything except the legs (Deleting is not necceserary, just helped everything be clean for me :D you could just use export selected instead) Now I deformed the mesh of the legs. (Not using pose, that is tricky and I couldent get it to work for CS4) Spread it out, and then exported as a wavefront obj.
Import into Photoshop - there you go, now you can easily get at the seams! :3 I only exported the legs becuase I personally don't know how to set up multiple materials for the three different body parts. Once I know this I'll upload a whole avatar mesh somewhere for anyone who needs it.

I may upload the bottom half only in a while once it's tidyed up but I'm doing so much at once it's kind of bottom of the pile :D If anyone asks me for it I'll put it up straight off, but it's a bit rough and ready.

Making skins in CS4

Well I'm working on my skin textures again, even if things are soon going to be changing I need a step back from mesh for a while. I'm getting there but havent really anything interesting to share yet :3

Though unrelated I have this link http://tentacolor.com/sl-animation-for-blender-newbs/ - If your interested in making your own pose for something, check it out. Making a static pose is well, as easy as could be. And animating in blender is suprisingly easy. So anyway.

On with this post.
I'm currently working on a Drow skin for a new friend of mine, I'm using a photobase that I picked up pretty cheaply off of XstreetSL some time ago. (I have still got a own photoskin project on the backburner but I decided to cheat for this so she could have her skin pretty quickly :D it'll also be usefull for the Cat skin project I'm still working on.) Long and short of this post is, if your using CS4 to work on skins and are having problems with the seams (Who doesent.) Try this trick.

Take a flatened layer of your whole photo texture. (I work on mine desaturated for numerous reasons, I feel it's easier to get a good feel for the contrast and flow of pattern while not being distracted by colour.) Now use the healing brush tool (The secondary one that looks like a plaster.) this works in a similar way to the clone tool, except it copies more the grain and pattern of an area than the saturation or hue. Meaning if you have a gradient you like but it's flat, and want to put a texture ontop without loosing the shadow underneath, this will work pretty well. As with any tool it takes some getting used to and still you sometimes need to do some things the long way. But working that out has saved me a lot of time. Hope it might you too :) (I'm going to be trying this out on my next lot of cloth textures, I predict it being REALLY helpfull :D)

Well theres the skin so far (Just a head shot to show what I'm working on... Will get some proper body shots once I can be bothered to make some straps to make it PG... *Dident check if there were anti pixel nipple rules for this blog :D*
Overall going well... Should be done tommrow, needs some shading fixes on arms and back. Then I can fully layer the face for makeups, and variations of musculity and stuffs. Then it should be ready for doing lots of fun things with :3 Be officialy the first CyKi skin to be fully produced.
Ignoring the Obake skins which are still not on sale and are more likely to be remade with this texture under them in some places. (SO I feel less like an Eloh rip off) The originals I will sell at just over upload cost, I think anything else for an Eloh based skin is unreasonable, and I suggest ANYONE hard up and wanting a good custom skin tries thier hand, If only Eloh brings out a -good- new edition male one that'll be everyone set for decent rp skins...

SL Viewers

nixRight, I got tired of Emergance constantly freezing up since installing my new graphics card and motherboard. Either they are messed up or it is. Plus I was getting this strange bug where clothes looked like a mostly transparent screen shot of the SL window... yeah...

So today I have installed Kirstens Viewer and I'm just about to Install Pheonix.

Kirstens Viewer

Kirstens looks pretty, the ambient shadows and new shiny all work on my computer but theres still the chat bar issue from viewer 2.0(Ie, you cannot have the chat bar in a detached window for local chat.) And also by now it would have sto...

Er, as I was saying, it would have stopped me from typing the sentance and made me go into a new one, becuase apparently local chat users have no desire to ever string together more than about two sentances.

It's not primarily KV's fault, and I might go back to it soon. Definately very shiny :3 I also get the impression she is very much a dedicated script worker, so it seems like a solid project despite it's problems.But I need to RP damnit!

Pheonix

Reminds me of Emerald and Emergance (Well they are all pretty much Emerald afterall) But with orange put on everything ¬.¬ So much orange... But besides the ui, which is orange... >.<... (Will be restarting it in the planest one, but theres not much choice.) Works pretty well. If it's stable or not over long times or not is the question, will update...

Victorian Mesh

I've decided I'm not happy with how victorian arcitecture tends to come up on SL, especially Victorian stuff. - I live in a Victorian terrace in real life, they put detail into everything.
Of course this isent secondlifes builders fault, up till now putting detail on a building made it unnecceserialy primmy.
But if I can make mesh which doesent over do the prims? Well thats my task for today. Working on good arcitecture. It occors to me I should be settled down into one area for making mesh, but I can't help but take a stab at building something I'm pretty familiar with!

That said, I do have some victorian (esque) dresses on the backburner, the next lot of creations may take me a few days however as this time - I'm going for making something good, not just another test run. (As mostly it seems to work pretty well by all accounts... Though there might be a problem with uploading submeshes, but I'll find out soon if that was just the one file.)