Blurred Textures After Upload - GIMP small tiles?

[Dhughan Froobert]

I've been banging the rocks on my head for about 2 weeks to no avail; need help and icebag.

I'm working on a simple mesh kit for a man's coat. I found some very nice quality fabric that the texture creator provides as 1024's, a convenient size to work on and then I know to reduce the size to 512 for use in SL. The kit came with the usual sample textures and shadow/UV map to use as examples for making shadows and so forth.

It looks great if I simply slap the 1024 on the mesh kit and set repeats, but then using the kit creator's shadowmap/AO isn't an option with the repeats. I was wondering about the materials slots but don't want a shiny or bumpy look.

It looks almost as good with a simple resized and repeated 512 of the plain fabric, very little difference (the example shown is the 1024). With the darker fabrics, this would be fine.

When I uploaded it previously, I was not sure if in GIMP I should leave the OLE compression box ticked or unticked. It seems to be better left unticked as the textures came out blurry on upload to the beta grid (or viewing as local textures on main grid). It seems fine now, as a plain fabric, with lossy compression off - is that right? I changed SL graphics preferences following a recent discussion here.

The real problem is I'd like to add some shadows for the lighter fabrics. I thought to scale the fabric in GIMP that I would use either "small tiles" to scale the repeats, and then overlay the shadows. But no matter what I do, the fabric (small-tiled, or pattern filled from a pattern I made) comes out blurry.

Is there a better way to do this in GIMP so that this nicely tileable plaid-ish wool can show the repeats, yet remain crisp and sharp on upload?

I'm sure it's some setting somewhere and I am being a complete doofus. The image below is crisp, but I can't get that effect unless it's the plain fabric, repeated in the SL edit window.

Grateful for your input! I did mess with my graphics settings (in Firestorm) to increase AA and anisotropic filtering. Should I back off from that?

 

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

How much space on the AO/shadow layer is this part of the coat? Given the way most FP creators lay out their work, it's probably crammed into a corner so the actual size is more like 256 x 256, which will affect resolution.

AFAIK, there isn't a whole lot possible other than trying to make separate textures for each of the faces (if it has multiple faces). Sloppy layout is my pet peeve with FP mesh, so I might be imposing that on what you've described, but it does sound very familiar.

Maybe someone will come along and give us both a better solution. Fingers crossed.

[arton Rotaru]

What Bitsy said, there is only so much resolution in a texture. It might help to have an image of the blurry version of the coat as well, to compare the two.
Lossy compression should be off, Anisoptric Filtering should be on. And the texture memory slider should be at max.

Think about it:
Lets say you have a 1 meter cube prim. If you put a 512 x 512 texture on it, you will have a texel density of 512 pixel per meter. Now repeat the texture 2 times in-world, and the texel density will be 1024 pixels per meter. Much higher resolution indeed. If you put a 256 x 256 on the cube, you have a texel density of 256 pixels per meter. If you increase the size of the cube to 2 meters, with a 512 x 512 texture, you also just have a texel density of 256 pixels per meter.

So it all comes down to the texel density of the coat, which depends on the UV layout, the size of the texture, and the size of the coat.

[Chic Aeon]

We don't actually know if it is a problem with the sizes within the AO map; it could be but I see a few things in your post that could be issues.

 

You do not need to reduce the size of your texture to 512 for MESH clothes.

For texture clothes those files are automatically change to 512 so yes, you DO want to do it yourself in that case rather than letting the uploader do it. 

So putting your 1024 texture on top of the AO map and using MULTIPLY in the layers properties blend mode (I don't have GIMP but you must have something like this) will give you what you need.

BUT if you want the texture smaller on your garment (tinier checks) you will need to resize your original checked texture down and then make a new 1024 one using that smaller texture as the "fill" to give you a finer check.  Not all programs will do this. I use a very old copy of Photo Impact when I need that to happen. These days I just do it inside of Blender LOL so that makes it simple. You don't have that choice.

 

Hope that was helpful.

Also from your photo it MIGHT be (again we can't see the AO map) that the SCALE is incorrect in the UV mapping -- hence the one fabric will be different sizes in different areas when used on the garment.  In that case it is definitely a mistake on the mesh makers part and you have to write it off as a loss. Hence why we see so much solid texture on garments 

[Dhughan Froobert]

Thank you so much for this explanation. I hope (and think) it was helpful, too!