Texture issues persist

[Fennet]

I'm still dealing with persistant texture issues on, unfortunately, my main texture, primarily. I use a 512x512px texture throughout, and it insists on blurring all the time, not just for me, but for other people, too.

The texture is not corrupt; I was able to resolve many of the blurring problems by using TextureLoadFullRes on the debug menu, (which causes its own problems, mainly of performance, but at least I know it's not my texture).

Clearing my cache does not help. And if it's blurry for me, my friends say it's blurry for them, too. One of them took snapshots and showed me how blurry it looks on their much-better-than-mine system.

The sim surround is another issue. The 1024p sq texture has become increasingly more blurry with time. I took several snapshots; 3 with my viewer cam, one with the snipping tool, and, as anyone can see, the texture itself is fine and should work. So why does this particular texture insist on blurring when applied to the sim surround, and how can I resolve this?  (The sim surround is a 256m cubed megaprim; I don't know of a better way to make this sim surround.)

TextureLoadFullRexz did nothing to unblur this particular texture. It's not the normal pixellation that occurs when you blow up a low rez picture, either. It's somthing else.

As an experiment, I applied the surround texture to boxes of various sizes; It blurs a bit on a 45m box, and it also blurs somewhat on a 7m box.

I'm just not getting this. If anyone can help here, I would greatly appreciate it.



[Fennet]

Something else just occured to me; I've been saving my textures (512px/sq and 1024px/sq) at 72 pixels per inch. I wonder if that has anything to do with it? I'm still stuck in old school, and that was the resolution we always used. I have no idea if everyone's doing it differently these days, maybe. 100 px/inch, possibly

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Update: the new 512px  upload was terrible. I tried re-uploading the 1024 px texture, and had slight, and I mean slight, improvement. The texture is still blurry, but at least the artifacts are gone. Changing the resolution for 72 px/inch to 100 px/inch made no difference whatsoever. It's fairly obvious to me that I'm going to have to rethink this whole thing.

 

[Chic Aeon]

You need to make the texture NEW at 100 or 200 or whatever pixels. If you are trying to make a new texture from your 72 bit one I am pretty sure you will not see an improvement. You can't add pixels after the fact. That is like trying to take a thumbnail profile picture and turn it into  something grand. So if you can find the original photo that is BIG you should be able to resize at a higher resolution.

 

I suggest some sort of sharpening after you resize down as you will automatically get some blur from the rearrangement (and loss) of pixels.

 

I have full sim surrounds that are 256 x 64 meters using a 512. 1024 texture and have never had this complaint from anyone, so it isn't something that happens all the time.

 

Good luck.

 

Edit: Sometimes (not often at all these days like once in a couple of years) you can have a texture degrade in the database. I don't think that is your issue as it is obvious on the texture itself. I just mentioned it as I had one do that today.  All blurry and weird. Colors still OK but certainly not usable. Happily it was recent and not too hard to find and upload again.  

 

For something 256 x 256 you will want a 1024 AND a tiling one. If you try and stretch a 1024 texture 256 meters --- well  it isn't pretty. IF that is what you are trying to do, I don't see how you can get it to work well.  I can't really see your photos well on my monitor so hard for me to get the details .

 

 

[Fennet]

Thanks, I got you. (Actually, 1024 pixels is 1024 pixels regardless of the resolution, it was just something to try.)

Because I can't make mountains and sky tileable, I'm thinking I need to use sections, or stack one 64meter tall megaprim on top of another until I reach the height I need, with a plain sky on the upper boxes. I have several fish to fry, so I may just have to put up with it for the moment.

There's always something that needs fixing, isn't there?

 

[Penny Patton]

The problem may not be the two textures in question, but your overall use of textures throughout your build.

Remember, videocards only have so much memory, once you exceed that your videocard needs to constantly shuffle textures in and out of memory, this is often called "texture thrashing" and you see it a lot in SL because people do things like use 1024x1024 textures on coffee mugs and shoelaces.

Try removing some of the more texture heavy items in your environment and see if that helps.

[Fennet]

I've read about texture thrashing, have experienced it in other places, and attempted to avoid in in several ways:

1) I use almost no 1024 textures on the sim. The only one I can even think of right now is the sim surround.

2) I used three 512 textures for the ground; the ground "sandstone" texture on the high elevations I also applied to most of the mesh, sculpt, and prim rocks, pillars, walls, etc.. (I also added a couple of other 512 textures, but you can get the drift.)

3) I don't see how it could possibly be texture heavy sim, at all, since there are few objects and it's fairly empty. 

However, I'll look into it again. Maybe some of the MP items are texture heavy like you say. But...If it were texture thrashing, it seems like it would be worse in places where I have plants, furniture, lots of small items, but that's not the case. The blurring seems to be far worse in the empty areas where there might be only 3 or 4 512 textures in view.

I've been promised inworld assistance with this; hopefully we'll be able to resolve it soon.

Something else occurred to me: might it have more to do with what we're wearing than what's on the sim?

[Fennet]

Chic:  I tried stacking 60 meter high megaprims with a new 1024 texture and it seems to be helping. I haven't got the new textures perfected yet, but I think it will work. Maybe. Fingers crossed.

I'm going to go on a search for some of your surrounds and see how they look on my computer. I hope you don't mind.

[Penny Patton]

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Fennet wrote:

However, I'll look into it again. Maybe some of the MP items are texture heavy like you say. But...If it were texture thrashing, it seems like it would be worse in places where I have plants, furniture, lots of small items, but that's not the case. The blurring seems to be far worse in the empty areas where there might be only 3 or 4 512 textures in view.

 

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 You never know where content creators are going to hide crazy amounts of ridiculously oversized textures. I once got a fantasy style tavern set where most of the items (including cups, pitchers, plates) had unique shadow textures that were 1024x1024 each. There was a wooden drinking cup in the set that had at least five 1024x1024 textures by itself. A drinking cup!

 The bar counter was broken up into at least 10 difference faces, each with its own 102x1024 texture, and all of those textures were filled with blank, unused space. All of the textures could have been combined into a single 1024x1024 with no quality loss.

 Since SL doesn't put any resource cap on textures like it does prims, most content creators go crazy with them,entirely oblivious to the impact it has on framerates, texture thrashing, and bandwidth useage.

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Fennet wrote:

 

Something else occurred to me: might it have more to do with what we're wearing than what's on the sim?

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That's entirely possible. I've seen individual avatars covered in over half a Gig's worth of textures.