Texture Area? What's That?

[Vanity Fair]

So, I was hanging out at Frank's Jazz Place (the upstart one, not the original one), listening to the music stream and dressed to kill in a fabulous ballgown (as one does 😉 ), when I spotted the following greyed-out fellow standing at the side of the dancefloor (see picture below).

I automatically have ARC turned on, so I am familiar with the Complexity figure, but I have never, EVER seen a "Texture Area" on an avatar before! (It's in red, so I assume that 1,213 metres squared is BAD...)

Has anyone come across this before?? What does this mean? And what would prompt such a warning?? Whatever it is, he refuses to rez in my Firestorm viewer.

Edited September 7, 2021 by Vanity Fair

[Blush Bravin]

I'm not positive, but I seem to remember something about a viewer update that changed the way jelly dolls are rendered. Perhaps it has something to do with that change?

 

[Vanity Fair]

Aha! The Firestorm wiki was most instructive:

Note: Another factor plays into whether an avatar is rendered as a jelly doll: texture area. If the texture area on an avatar is above the default (1000 m^2), then the avatar will render as a jelly doll even if it has a complexity less than your limit. If this is the case, a small green square is displayed next to the complexity figure in the name tag. (Also note: Your own texture area figure–in YOUR view only–includes your HUDs. Other people will see your texture area figure without HUDs included.)

[Whirly Fizzle]

If you wish to raise the texture area limit, the debug setting is RenderAutoMuteSurfaceAreaLimit

[Orwar]

   I'm curious about the conversion rate of megapixels to square metres .. Because how many pixels you get into a square metre is entirely up to the texture resolution, so that measurement always struck me as peculiar. 

[Skell Dagger]

I've only ever seen this texture area warning four times inworld. On each occasion it was on a male avatar, and that male avatar was wearing all four copies of the Belleza Jake body in the folder (prior to the recent update). Guaranteed if you'd scanned that guy with a 'What is She Wearing?' HUD he would have been wearing exactly the same.

Seeing that four times, and for exactly the same reason each time, was enough for me to update my tutorial blog about putting together a male mesh avatar, as follows (expand the quote to read in full) -

Quote

If you’re wearing Belleza’s Jake body, you only need ONE of those. They are each different copies of the body, with different options for hands and feet. The most up-to-date one is the one called -Belleza- Jake 2.1 Bento. All of the others are older options, to be worn if you have older fitted items such as shoes or gloves/nails, since—when Belleza updated Jake—they changed the mesh on the hands and feet. Confusing for anyone, I know, especially if you’re not aware of that. And the way that they’re named makes it look as if one of those items is just the feet and another is the hands. But they are all full bodies. Here they are in the actual folder:

 

Edited September 7, 2021 by Skell Dagger

[Fritigern Gothly]

So, nobody really has any idea what could CAUSE this?

I do.

As a moderator (officer) at a popular nude beach in SL, I see lots of mistakes. Usually I see this problem with guys, and only when the guy in question is wearing a Belleza Jake body.

The Jake comes in 4 variants. Full body with hands and feet attached, one without hands, one without feet, and one without hands OR feet.

Sometimes, guys just wear the whole shebang, not realizing they effectively are wearing 4 bodies. This pushes the texture area well over 1,000.

Note that some less knowledgeable people take this as the person in question trying to grief, because "why else would the texture area so high?", however, in my experience, these guys simply have no idea that they are wearing two bodies at the same time so do work with them to help them get rid of the extra stuff they are wearing.

Edited September 7, 2021 by Fritigern Gothly
Okay, so while I was writing this up, Skell made a post with the correct answer. I'm leaving this post here anyway....

[Blush Bravin]

This isn't just a guy thing or a Jake thing. As a moderator in the Maitreya Lara Friends group I've had numerous occasions where I've gone to help someone with an issue and it was caused by wearing multiple copies of the body at the same time. Fortunately it's an easy fix and once the person is made aware they probably, well hopefully, won't forget the lesson.

[Vanity Fair]

Well, I'm glad I asked! The next time I see this avatar at Frank's, I will let him know. 😉

[Chaser Zaks]

IIRC, Texture area is basically repeats per square meter summed. It is Second Life's version of Texel Density, which is basically the same thing but for faces.

Simply put, Texture Area is the sum of this thing:

So for each face of each object, add "Repeats per meter" together, and you get the texture area.

Higher texture area means more interpolation.

To calculate a texture area, you take the face you want to calculate, and figure out it's world space occupation, then divide that by the horizontal and vertical scale.

Because of how this is calculated, I don't think it really works with mesh because mesh can have it's own UVs which are different from texture repeat, so a mesh can have a UV that repeats a million times, but H/V scale don't repeat, so that means it'd show up as the object's size divided by 1.

[Maitimo]

I've seen this once, on a guy wearing one of those huge hyper-muscled avatars. 

[Dragon Mommy]

I actually had this problem on my modded iMonster dragon avatar. I discovered the rigged mane I was using had 3 seperate levels of fur hidden under it that, while meant to give it depth, wasn't visible at all once I had switched from Alpha blending to alpha masking. That mane alone was something like 544sq m of textures before that. It was bonkers. 

[Alunax]

But... how to know one's Texture Area when it's not oversized? Especially see oneself's so it can avoid this, or let a creator be careful with its mesh.

[animats]

Considering that the surface area of the human body is around 2 square meters, something has gone horribly wrong if the clothing area exceeds 1000 square meters.

[Mollymews]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Considering that the surface area of the human body is around 2 square meters, something has gone horribly wrong if the clothing area exceeds 1000 square meters.

this is probably what the baby thought when their mum invented the swaddling cloth 😺