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