Textures in SL turn out grey

[Reiramon]

Hello,

I made a simple test building for myself in Blender. I baked the textures and tweaked them a bit in Photoshop.

Now when I upload the texture local in Second Life I get a result similar to untextured mesh. It is too dark, the only way for me to actually see it is to set it to Full Bright. Which apparently is bad.

Pictures for reference. As you can see on the texture it is white with (badly) applied shadow. The middle line contains faces too, it just turned out white as a whole after uploaded to forums.

After applied to mesh in SL, it is gray.

I checked the color option, it is set to White.

Please dont mind the crappy UV. I overlayed the same faces, same inside, same outside, on top of each other so save space.

 

Edit: If I rotate it so the sides are upwards, the color kicks in and the texture looks normal. Seems like an issue with world lightning?

Edited February 23, 2019 by Reiramon

[Whirly Fizzle]

Possibly inverted normals on the mesh?

[Pamela Galli]

Check to see if you have more than one set of UVs. That happens if you join two meshes with different named UVs

Edited February 23, 2019 by Pamela Galli

[Reiramon]

7 minutes ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Possibly inverted normals on the mesh?

I checked and the normals are as they should be. Facing the correct way.

I took more pictures so the problem is more visible. I am almost certain the issue is with the SL lightning rendering and my texture, as other textures (from SL library for example) dont look that dark.

I noticed that if I rotate my mesh sideways, so the wall face upwards, the color also changes. So it must be the lightning. I baked it in blender and the baked texture color is the same as when I rotated it in world in SL.

No idea if its my baking settings (since the source texture is white background color) or what. Didnt have this issue with wearables.

5 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

Check to see if you have more than one set of UVs. That happens if you join two meshes with different named UVs

I did check and I only have 1 UV map. The one I did manual unwrap for.

Tried deleting my manual unwrap UV map - used smart UV project - rebake - reupload. But got the same result.

[Pamela Galli]

What is the name of the UV?  And did you join meshes?

Edited February 23, 2019 by Pamela Galli

[Reiramon]

52 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

What is the name of the UV?  And did you join meshes?

The UV is called UVMap. Created by Blender. I deleted the original one, created a new one (with the same name by default) and manually unwrapped the mesh.

I didnt join meshes. I modeled it from a duplicate of the floor. The floor is a separate object.

[Ivanova Shostakovich]

   I notice you say you've checked the color option. Does this mean you checked the face colors in the SL editor? I've recently had uploaded mesh be colored grey. It turned out that Blender colored it. I was able to change it to white in the Viewer edit tools color picker.

Edited February 24, 2019 by Ivanova Shostakovich

[Pamela Galli]

2 hours ago, Reiramon said:

The UV is called UVMap. Created by Blender. I deleted the original one, created a new one (with the same name by default) and manually unwrapped the mesh.

I didnt join meshes. I modeled it from a duplicate of the floor. The floor is a separate object.

Darn, I was sure that was it. I have done that so many times after joining things with UVs with different names.

Edited February 24, 2019 by Pamela Galli

[ChinRey]

Seems there's some confusion whether it's the texture or the mesh that causes the problem. That at least is easy enough to check and I assume you've already done it but just in case:

Try to use a different texture for the mesh. Anything will do, it's just to see if the mesh takes textures at all.

Then, double-click on the texture in your inventory to see if it looks right.

It may be something as simple as a corrupted cache file. Do other people see it the same way you do? If not, clear your cahce.

[Reiramon]

21 hours ago, Ivanova Shostakovich said:

   I notice you say you've checked the color option. Does this mean you checked the face colors in the SL editor? I've recently had uploaded mesh be colored grey. It turned out that Blender colored it. I was able to change it to white in the Viewer edit tools color picker.

Yes. I checked the viewer edit tools color picker ^^ Its pure white.

 

21 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

Darn, I was sure that was it. I have done that so many times after joining things with UVs with different names.

Is there a treshold of how large a single mesh can be? This particular one I made is 30x30m on the walls. Should I split it in half?

 

12 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Seems there's some confusion whether it's the texture or the mesh that causes the problem. That at least is easy enough to check and I assume you've already done it but just in case:

Try to use a different texture for the mesh. Anything will do, it's just to see if the mesh takes textures at all.

Then, double-click on the texture in your inventory to see if it looks right.

It may be something as simple as a corrupted cache file. Do other people see it the same way you do? If not, clear your cahce.

I have tried a different texture as you suggested. The result was still dark.

Only after changing the "World" values to 3.0 in strenght in Blender produced a kind of good result. The problem is, the baked texture looks overly bright. 

Do you suppose an overly bright texture would pose a problem, if the texture on mesh looks kind of OK?

I realized Second Lifes atmospheric shaders might be the issue because even with texture set to "Blank" which is default white, the inside and outside faces were grey-ish. Only top faces on my mesh are illuminated properly.

I think the only way to bypass this is to make the texture brighter.

Edited February 24, 2019 by Reiramon

[ChinRey]

That last post clears up quite a bit.

 

31 minutes ago, Reiramon said:

Only after changing the "World" values to 3.0 in strenght in Blender produced a kind of good result.

Be careful with that because it is not transferred to Second Life so it's easy to get fooled.

32 minutes ago, Reiramon said:

I think the only way to bypass this is to make the texture brighter.

Yes probably. You won't be the first to be caught by surprise by how dark Second Life can be (especially if you use Ultra high grahpics) and how wharp the shadows are.

 

[Pamela Galli]

The only size threshold would be a bounding box of 64;like any other type of prim.

let us know when you get it figured out.

Also, does the texture look the same on a plain prim cube?

Edited February 25, 2019 by Pamela Galli

[Christhiana]

I honestly don't see anything wrong with those screenshots. I assume they were taken with the sun at midday position. That would mean only the top faces get brightly lit. The other faces will receive shadow. This would explain why the wall gets brighter as you tilt the model. In that screenshot you can see the walls facing (slightly) upwards get more light but the ones that are stil vertical don't.

[Maitimo]

Try changing your windlight settings; use something like Nam's Optimal Skin & Prim, or make your own by turning Sun/Moon way down and Ambient Light up. That will give you a truer view of the textures without turning fullbright on.

[Gary Kohime]

Its been a longgggg time since being in SL, and recently I set up a local OpenSim sim on my PC in support of importing my SL self-created objects to my PC, for various reasons.

Anyway, when using the latest release of Firestorm (6.3.2.58052), an export from SL works for the most part (functionally speaking),  but, a lot of my objects/builds exported as a Colada or Link Set, the textures would be all white/grey See attached images (each named to reflect my point(s). 

Now, granted I am using the Firestorm viewer for OS Grids, so I believe this isn't related to the issue? So, in trying to isolate this problem with various viewers, i.e.; Black Dragon, Alchemy or Singularity, it was only when using Singularity (XML export) that I was able to find the root cause of the issue. Which is, on any prims having this issue, and in checking the texture tab of the respective prim, it would show grey/white. If I selected "Alpha Mode" to None (in Singularity), the texture would then appear on the prim! In some cases I had to search for the correct texture and select it. But, for the most part it was the Alpha Mode setting that resolves the issue.

Now, wanting to use Firestorm as a viewer of choice, is there something in it that can render ALL texture imports with No (None) Alpha Mode setting as a default? Am I missing something here?

Any suggestions would be appreciated. (I may post this on the Firestorm community board?)

See below images for example of issue and upload settings (if mesh import)

Thanks!

[Chic Aeon]

I have never had this issue on any Opensim grid (and I have been on many).     I use Firestorm.  

 

Here is what happens for me. Export build.

Import dae file (this was a three piece linkset. 

 

Add texture (one mesh at a time).

That is the way it has always worked for me in Opensim. This was on the Kitely Merchant Sandbox. 

 

Basically your texture should NOT (as far as I can see) HAVE an alpha channel.  That may be the simple explanation :D.  

 

 

[Gary Kohime]

Thanks for the response Chic, I'm baffled (or I think I am) LOL.

I have a thought,  and I have used Gimp for many years in making my textures. When exporting them from Gimp I always do as a PNG, see attached, highlighted. Now, when I do this export part of the dialog for a PNG export is the opportunity to select "Save Background Color". What this does, if you don't know,  is it "flattens" the image, or in other words, if it has layers, it makes them all one, and fills all Transparent (Alpha?) pixels with a color, most often white. Anyway, I ignore this setting a lot, especially if my image is intended to be transparent in some way. Often I forget about it no matter what. So, I am wondering if this is my root cause of this issue? 

Furthermore, I wonder if there is a viewer Debug setting that would set ALL my textures to None for Alpha (this might be a rabbit hole I don't want to go down)  upon an export from SL?

Thanks again!

Gary