Tattoos with super fine writing - best way to bring into SL?

[Melissaa Sirnah]

I'm trying to make a small tattoo and want my writing to be legible but I've had no luck so far. I've read over many past threads and have tried the majority of suggestions and I'm starting to think that maybe this tattoo is just too small. I've purposely gone through SL and looked for tattoos of similar size with higher quality and have found a few of them so I'm just kind of clueless at this point. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

[Chic Aeon]

My only general thought is that it often depends a lot on the font used. So a super thin font will oftenbreak apart when uploaded (and compressed in the process). If you have already tried other tricks like making large and then resizing before upload, you might try changing font styles.   

[Madelaine McMasters]

Hi Melissaa,

I'd place the tattoo image on a small prim that you attach. Pick a prim type, cube, cylinder, or sphere, from which you can cut away a surface section that roughly matches the contour of the small area of skin you're covering. Make the entire prim transparent except the face on which the tattoo goes.

Apply your tattoo texture to that remaining visible face. The texture should fill the image area you're using, and you'll pick an upload size that yields the resolution you desire.

Once you've textured the object, attach it to the body part to be tattooed and position it so the textured surface is just above the skin.

This isn't a perfect solution, but I've used it successfully.

Good luck!

[Nalates Urriah]

Madelaine's suggestion is good and possibly the easiest solution.

The challenge in getting a crisp image in SL is dealing with the compression used by SL, JPG2000. These textures max out at 1024x1024 (in SL) and have several levels of compression. Larger sized textures are down sized to 1024 and compressed, losing quality. Photoshop will do a much better down size then SL.

Textures between 1024x1024 and 64x64 are only compressed, not downsized. Textures 64x64 and smaller are used as is.

Then there is the problem for tatoos of Server Side Appearance (SSA). As you add skin and clothes the final combination is sent to SL servers and a composite image is baked and used as your final appearance. The bake engines reduce the final texture to a 512x512 texture. So, using tattoo textures larger than 512 means the bake engine will down size it.

Then there is texture shape... textures should generally be square 1024x1024, for simplicity and use with avatar templates. But, for crispness you must use a power of 2 size, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, and 1024. You can also mix the sizes; 32x1024... like for a rope. Using any other dimensions will result in the image being resized by the SL storage system and you will lose quality.

I hope this helps.

 

[LoganCallaghan]

So, I was working on a tattoo that was at 1024x1024, and it was blurred and looking nasty. 

I resized the entire image to 512 x 512, tried it on a "jacket layer", and BAM! It made everything as crisp as I intended for it to be. Thanks for the info!