Mesh vs Prim Textures

[kevin Jerrold]

I've been building recently and creating my own textures RL and uploading them to SL. I'm not sure if I'm doing it properly. Am I actually creating mesh textures or just old school textures.

Examples attached.

Transparent framed windows with 2 different backgrounds.

[animats]

All textures are just ordinary pictures.

The confusing thing is how textures are mapped to mesh. This depends on "UV coordinates", for which see Google and the Blender manual.

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, kevin Jerrold said:

Am I actually creating mesh textures or just old school textures.

What do you mean "just"? Whether you build with prims or mesh, the rule is still use tiled textures when possible, baked textures when necessary! That's what professional game creators do The reason why so many SL builders don't is mostly because of ignorance, partly because of the extended (ab)use of quick and dirty "Blender bake fail" textures here.

It's baked textures that are "old style" btw. The only reason it took so long for tiled textures to catch on is that Pixar somehow managed to secure patents for the concept so everybody else had to wait until the patents expired.

[kevin Jerrold]

4 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

What do you mean "just"? Whether you build with prims or mesh, the rule is still use tiled textures when possible, baked textures when necessary! That's what professional game creators do The reason why so many SL builders don't is mostly because of ignorance, partly because of the extended (ab)use of quick and dirty "Blender bake fail" textures here.

It's baked textures that are "old style" btw. The only reason it took so long for tiled textures to catch on is that Pixar somehow managed to secure patents for the concept so everybody else had to wait until the patents expired.

So the way I do my textures is a good way of doing it. Yes or no. The textures I've added above I'll show you what I'm making

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, kevin Jerrold said:

So the way I do my textures is a good way of doing it. Yes or no.

We can't really see exactly how you've textured it from your pictures and there are several good solutions but for a build like this, if you texture it the traditional SL way and don't use any 1024x1024 textures, you're doing fine.

As the facade looks now, it should not use more than 1 megapixel of textures in total. This includes the exterior walls with the panels, the windows and the concrete framework. It can actually be done with less than 0.5 but 1 is perfectly ok.

For reference:

• A 1024z1024 texture = 1 megapixel
• A 512x512 = 0.25 megapixels
• A 256x256 = 0.125 megapixels

[Chic Aeon]

I am still a big believer in baked textures (not baked on cast shadows but the AMBIENT change in the light which is baked in and makes things look much more realistic). So there is that.   A "baked" brick wall looks very different than a tiled brick wall.  So it really depends on the look you are after.  That being said there is really NO reason to make a dozen `024 textures for your building.  I usually have three 1024s for a smallish house (one exterior, one interior and one roof and ceiling.  Floors can often be fine with tiled textures or add one more 1024 for your flooring.  

 

So it depends on what you are going after for your final look.  The baked textures if done correctly will be subtle but more realistic and a flat tiling texture.  Hence I almost always bake using Blender Cycles. 

 

Below is a THREE STORY section of an apartment house -- the exterior.  If you used the same tiling "stucco" on it there were be no difference in the value (light and darkness) of the different pieces. 

 

That's my input.

 

[ChinRey]

39 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

I am still a big believer in baked textures (not baked on cast shadows but the AMBIENT change in the light which is baked in and makes things look much more realistic).

Take a look at this:

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/nivelles-corner-house-1-belgium-bc509592ce6442eb95239dc8fb40c0e7

and this:

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/nivelles-house-4-belgium-6b4c99fce4c94fc99ba6cfb3b4502e1b

and this:

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/nivelles-house-5-belgium-8d8c5341da4f4487a71897a3762c0aa8

These four houses were made for Cities: Skylines by somebody who isn't even a professional, just a skilled hobbyist. They share the same 256x2048 texture plus matching normal and specular maps, adding up to 1.5 megapixels for the whole set.

Of course, we can't use the exact same textruing method in SL but we can get the same result with just as few, and even with fewer, pixels. You're truly a skilled texture artist if, and only if, you can achieve that. (I would actually have invested more texture space to a build like this to increase the sharpness. But that's beside the point because this is not about the total number of pixels used or the visual appearance but about the ratio between the two.)

Edited February 7, 2022 by ChinRey

[Chic Aeon]

I personally don't like that look but agree that one 2048 texture (I think this can only be uploaded with Black Dragon or maybe another 3rd party viewer) is the same as my FOUR 1024s.  I also VERY seldom use specular or normal maps and bake those part (subtly ) into the single texture.  So my typical build would be less.  

I also really hate those cast shadows because they conflict mightily when you use viewer shadows.   But we each have a right to choose our methods.

 

You and I have always built differently so there is no reason for us to agree on textures NOW :D.  We do agree on many things but we don't need to agree on this LOL.

[tomm55]

17 hours ago, kevin Jerrold said:

I've been building recently and creating my own textures RL and uploading them to SL. I'm not sure if I'm doing it properly. Am I actually creating mesh textures or just old school textures.

Examples attached.

Transparent framed windows with 2 different backgrounds.

I am not an expert on textures, but I will try to explain.

There are basically two ways in SL:

1) You either create your object in SL using prims (cube, sphere, etc.) and you set textures to faces of those prims.
2) Or, you create your object outside of SL in a 3D modelling software, for example in Blender, Maya, etc. and that's called mesh. The mesh object can again have multiple faces and you can texture each face individually (either in the 3D software, or in SL). Additionally you can use the advantages of UV mapping in this case.

I am not 100% sure what method you are using (difficult to say from a picture), but if you made your house of individual linked prims, then that's the case number 1) and some people might call it the "old school way" 🙂  In my opinion there is nothing like a mesh texture or prim texture. Texture is a texture. You can however have an UV mapped texture that is made for a specific mesh object and UV map, for example.

I hope I am not completely wrong.

Edited February 7, 2022 by tomm55
wording

[arton Rotaru]

13 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Take a look at this:

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/nivelles-corner-house-1-belgium-bc509592ce6442eb95239dc8fb40c0e7

and this:

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/nivelles-house-4-belgium-6b4c99fce4c94fc99ba6cfb3b4502e1b

and this:

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/nivelles-house-5-belgium-8d8c5341da4f4487a71897a3762c0aa8

These four houses were made for Cities: Skylines by somebody who isn't even a professional, just a skilled hobbyist. They share the same 256x2048 texture plus matching normal and specular maps, adding up to 1.5 megapixels for the whole set.

Of course, we can't use the exact same textruing method in SL but we can get the same result with just as few, and even with fewer, pixels. You're truly a skilled texture artist if, and only if, you can achieve that. (I would actually have invested more texture space to a build like this to increase the sharpness. But that's beside the point because this is not about the total number of pixels used or the visual appearance but about the ratio between the two.)

To be fair though, the Sketchfab post processing does add some pretty real time Ambient Occlusion to the builds.

[ChinRey]

14 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

I personally don't like that look but agree that one 2048 texture ... is the same as my FOUR 1024s.

This is a 256x2048, not a 2048x2048, so it's the same as two 512x512s.

14 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

(I think this can only be uploaded with Black Dragon or maybe another 3rd party viewer)

You can't uppload that texture to SL of course, that's one of the reasons I said we would have to do it differently here. The most obvious solution would be to split it into two 256x1024s but there are other options as well.

But as I said, those houses were made for Cities: Skyline, not SL. It's a different environment with different requirements. (If you don't know Cities: Skylines, it's a city building game; think SimCity on steroids.) What I wanted to do with those examples was not to show in detail how it can be done in SL but to address two myths that have caused and still cause lots of issues in SL.

---*---

The first is that other 3D environments use higher texture resolutions than SL. It's the other way round. That is, other environments tend to use higher texture resolutions but not to increase the texel density. They use them to merge multiple smaller low rez textures into single big texture atlases, reducing the number of files needed. Even in AAA I-can't-believe-how-gorgeous-it-looks games the actual texture resolution is generally much lower than what we typically see in SL. Certainly not higher.

---*---

The second is that the "old style" (from an SL perspective that is) way of texturing is outdated. It isn't and now that all the patents have expired, people working with other virtual reality/game engines are trying to emulate this way of texturing in various ways. Here's the UV map for the small corner house:

See how the islands extend far outside the texture area to create horizontal repeats and how much the different islands overlap. The empty spaces on the UV map are not wasted btw, that's where texture details included in one or more of the other houses but not this one go.

Apparently Cities: Skylines doesn't allow for meshes with multiple textures so everything is merged into a single texture atlas. That means there is no way to have both vertical and horizontal tiling at the same time. Unless you cheat that is:

To get vertical repeats for the roof, the creator had to split it into two and put the parts on top of each other on the UV map. This was to achieve something we can simply dial up by changing a number or two in the edit palette.

So often we see SL (and Sansar for too, come to think of it) tries to be up to date by implementing solutions other VR/game engines introduced ten years ago whilst other engines and people building for them are busy implementing solutions SL had right from the start. In this respect SL suffers badly from the Invented Here syndrome and it would be great if we could all get out of that mindset.

Mind you, I did not say we shouldn't use baked textures at all. They've been around in SL for as long as SL has existed and they certainly have their place. But they shouldn't be abused. Don't use them if they don't actually add anything to the looks and even when they do, ask yourself if they're worth the extra load, the extra time and the reduced flexibility. If the answer is yes, sure, go for it! When you do the UV mapping as well as you do, Chic, it's not adding that much extra load anyway but let's face it, that's rare in SL. You're a better texture artist than 99.99% of SL builders, not only the happy hobbyists but also the ones who aspire to be professionals or at least semi-pros.

Take a look at the OP's pictures again. How much do you think AO would add to a brick texture that dark? I'd say nothing and that means it would be baking for baking's sake, not to improve the looks.

--*--

This brings me to one of my pet peeves in SL: the shadeless "baking". I'm going to abuse one of my own builds as an example since I don't want to name and shame anybody. I made this little cottage a while ago but never got around to use it for anything:

The UV map for the exterior wall and the chimneys:

This is only lowest quarter of the map btw. The rest of it is used for other parts of the cottage.

The exterior walls are textured with a 512x512 repeated ten times.

Now, if I did it the way some SL builders do it, I would have used a texture like this:

Simply the same 512 texture duplicated ten times horizontally and 2.5 times vertically, with the parts of the map not actually displayed blackened out and with the whole texture scaled down to 256x1024 to fit SL's 1024 limit. The result is this:

Why, why, WHY???

We actually spend considerable building time reducing the quality of the build with nothing whatsover gained! Of course, you could (and probably would) remap to use the entire 1024x1024 texture surface but that would add considerably to the load and build time and it still wouldn't be quite as sharp as the single tiled 512x512.

As a bonus, by using fairly standardized tiled textures, it's dead easy to retexture for a different look. Just slap another ready made texture on it et voila!

Of course, I'd have to change some of the other textures too to do it properly but you get the point.

---*---

14 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

I also VERY seldom use specular or normal maps and bake those part (subtly ) into the single texture.

That's understandable and I tend to do the same myself. I do use them sometimes but SL's implementation of specular and especially normal maps is just too flawed. They're awkward too work with, normal maps don't tend to go along well with Windlight/EEP and they add a disproportionally amount of extra load on less powerful computers. But they were launched towards the end of the Six Black Years so I guess we shouldn't expect more. LL is talking about implementing full PBS now though and maybe, just maybe, they'll take use opportunity to fix the mistakes of the past. We'll see.

--*--

14 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

You and I have always built differently so there is no reason for us to agree on textures NOW :D.  We do agree on many things but we don't need to agree on this LOL.

Style is style and quite subjective so there's really no right or wrong and not much to disagree or agree about there.

Keep in mind that the houses I linked to were made for Cities: Skylines. The focus there is realism, quite different from SL's typical stylized and romanticized look so that's what the creator went for.

I try to adapt to whatever environment I'm building for too but my preferred style is somewhere in between those two, actually quite similar to what you make, Chic. I get all the realism I need in RL and I do want my virtual world to be a little bit idealized. But if we take it too far, it turns into kitch. (This doesn't apply to pure fantasy settings of course - that's a completely different story.)

--*--

7 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

To be fair though, the Sketchfab post processing does add some pretty real time Ambient Occlusion to the builds.

Oh yes! If we could only have shaders like that in SL! Maybe we will some day but the fact that LL completely ignored this when they developed EEP doesn't exactly imply that they understand the issue.

Edited February 8, 2022 by ChinRey
Fixing a few of the typos

[tomm55]

15 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Take a look at this:

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/nivelles-corner-house-1-belgium-bc509592ce6442eb95239dc8fb40c0e7

and this:

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/nivelles-house-4-belgium-6b4c99fce4c94fc99ba6cfb3b4502e1b

and this:

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/nivelles-house-5-belgium-8d8c5341da4f4487a71897a3762c0aa8

These four houses were made for Cities: Skylines by somebody who isn't even a professional, just a skilled hobbyist. They share the same 256x2048 texture plus matching normal and specular maps, adding up to 1.5 megapixels for the whole set.

Of course, we can't use the exact same textruing method in SL but we can get the same result with just as few, and even with fewer, pixels. You're truly a skilled texture artist if, and only if, you can achieve that. (I would actually have invested more texture space to a build like this to increase the sharpness. But that's beside the point because this is not about the total number of pixels used or the visual appearance but about the ratio between the two.)

Those sketchfab models look nice in my opinion, but when you zoom in a little bit, then you start to see those unpleasing pixel patterns. Of course it depends on your requirements. If you have for example a lot of buildings only for decoration, then you probably don't need all of them to be highly detailed. But if that should be for example my home in SL, then I would expect it to be of higher detail.

Also the disadvantage in SL is that if you want to bake some (e.g. soft) shadows or ambient occlusion to your textures, then you can't fully use the advantages of tiled/seamless textures. Because by baking those shadows or occlusion you are basically making those textures non-tiled/non-repeating. And since we are limited to 1024x1024 pixels, the baking process can actually degrade the details. I hope I did not say a complete nonsense now 🙂 Or is there a way of not losing detail while baking AO?

Edit: Wait, why do we even bake AO?  I mean, is it just because of users that don't have graphics on ultra? Because there should be some ambient occlusion in the SL viewer, right. So is it to make it look good also on low graphics? Or to pronounce the AO effect? Or because we can't have soft shadows? Too many questions I guess  

Edited February 7, 2022 by tomm55

[ChinRey]

15 minutes ago, tomm55 said:

Those sketchfab models look nice in my opinion, but when you zoom in a little bit, then you start to see those unpleasing pixel patterns. Of course it depends on your requirements. If you have for example a lot of buildings only for decoration, then you probably don't need all of them to be highly detailed. But if that should be for example my home in SL, then I would expect it to be of higher detail.

Yes and as I said, I would have invested in higher resolution and sharped textures for houses like these, even though they only are intended as sim fillers. But again, it's not about how few textures we use or how good the actual result is, it's all bout how much we can get for how little. Including the normal and specular maps those four houses share the equivalent of six 512x512 textures between them and they still look great at any view distance but up close. That's a lot of bangs for the buck, far more than we usually get in SL but not actually very unusual in computer games and other 3D environments.

 

48 minutes ago, tomm55 said:

Also the disadvantage in SL is that if you want to bake some (e.g. soft) shadows or ambient occlusion to your textures, then you can't fully use the advantages of tiled/seamless textures.

You can't?

Quick and dirty retexturing with a texture that doesn't really fit the house. Picture taken without ALM and with default midday windlight. The wall texture is a 512x1024 and it's only tiled horizontally so yes, I suppose you're not completely wrong.

 

51 minutes ago, tomm55 said:

Edit: Wait, why do we even bake AO?  I mean, is it just because of users that don't have graphics on ultra?

Yes, that's part of the reason and for many SL'ers the reason they can't use ultra graphics is that their gpus are loaded down with all those textures with baked AO. Still, even in Ultra, SL's shaders leave a bit to be desired and they're certainly not up to modern standards.

[tomm55]

4 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Including the normal and specular maps those four houses share the equivalent of six 512x512 textures between them and they still look great at any view distance but up close. 

Well, I am not that experienced in making 3D objects in SL (yet ), but I agree that the houses look good and considering they use just 1.5 megapixels for whole, than that's probably very good.

9 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

The wall texture is a 512x1024 and it's only tiled horizontally so yes, I suppose you're not completely wrong.

That is what I am talking about. I mean, if you had a brick texture tiled by both axes, then you could have used a small texture containing just few bricks. But by baking soft shadows you basically have to use a bigger texture for the whole wall. Or I don't get it how you mean that it is tiled horizontally. To me it looks like whole side of the house (consisting of bricks) is one texture (from top to bottom) or a part of one texture. Where is the horizontal tiling? Or is it mirrored?

15 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Still, even in Ultra, SL's shaders leave a bit to be desired and they're certainly not up to modern standards.

Yes. I don't have a good GPU so I can't really say, but in my case even on Ultra there is not everything that I would expect to see (e.g. shadows inside hollow objects).

[ChinRey]

8 minutes ago, tomm55 said:

Where is the horizontal tiling?

[tomm55]

28 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Btw, can I ask you, how do you make the ambient occlusion so emphasized? (sorry if emphasized is not the right word, English is not my 1st language)

I mean, I made a model in Blender and when I baked the AO, it was only very subtle. Do you use Blender too and if yes, is there a way to set it to be more visible?

And sorry for off-topic 🙂

[tomm55]

2 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I understand it now 🙂 Thanks.

[ChinRey]

15 minutes ago, tomm55 said:

Btw, can I ask you, how do you make the ambient occlusion so emphasized?

I don't usually bake in Blender. Even on the rare occasions that I use it to generate the AO map I export it separately and add it to the texture in an image editor (I use paint.net but any reasonably advanced one will do). That gives me full control of how much shading I want.

This house uses a completely different trick though. It has "shading faces" along the edges like this:

Add a low rez white-to-transparent gradient and use tint, texture repeat/offset and transparency to dial up exactly the effect you want. This is an old build of mine and I changed my focus from houses to plants shortly after so I've never did much with the trick myself. I'm not a big fan of edge shading anyway and as it is right now, I wonder what will happen to edge shaded textures if/when LL launches full PBR. That would include Fresnel effect simulation which basically do the opposite, lightening the surface along the edges.

Nor do I know of other builders using it. Except for Hattie Panacek that is; she used it for her Soho houses. She may have learned it from me or I may have learned it from her or we may have come up with it together. We were throwing a lot of ideas at each other at that time and I can't remember exactly how it went.

In any case, since this is an old build and my first attempt to use the trick, I made a lot of mistakes. One of them was to not include a shader face along the bottom. That's the only reason why I can't use vertical tiling. Then again, maybe there's no need for shading along the bottom. What do you think?

[tomm55]

5 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I don't usually bake in Blender. Even on the rare occasions that I use it to generate the AO map I export it separately and add it to the texture in an image editor (I use paint.net but any reasonably advanced one will do). That gives me full control of how much shading I want.

This house uses a completely different trick though. It has "shading faces" along the edges like this:

Add a low rez white-to-transparent gradient and use tint, texture repeat/offset and transparency to dial up exactly the effect you want. This is an old build of mine and I changed my focus from houses to plants shortly after so I've never did much with the trick myself. I'm not a big fan of edge shading anyway and as it is right now, I wonder what will happen to edge shaded textures if/when LL launches full PBR. That would include Fresnel effect simulation which basically do the opposite, lightening the surface along the edges.

Nor do I know of other builders using it. Except for Hattie Panacek that is; she used it for her Soho houses. She may have learned it from me or I may have learned it from her or we may have come up with it together. We were throwing a lot of ideas at each other at that time and I can't remember exactly how it went.

In any case, since this is an old build and my first attempt to use the trick, I made a lot of mistakes. One of them was to not include a shader face along the bottom. That's the only reason why I can't use vertical tiling. Then again, maybe there's no need for shading along the bottom. What do you think?

Yes, that is a good trick, it will allow you to have just a texture for bricks without the need to bake the soft shadow to it.

I think it's a matter of preference, with the bottom shadow it looks more dramatic I would say,  but I like it both 🙂

[kevin Jerrold]

So this is my method. I ain't got a clue what method I'm using. Am I baking textures?? 

Look what I did with the round window. I added a round hollowed out prim.

[arton Rotaru]

15 minutes ago, kevin Jerrold said:

Am I baking textures?? 

If you can't answer that question yourself, then you certainly don't bake textures.

However, any method that creates the desired result (something you are satisfied with) is as good as any other method.

Edited February 8, 2022 by arton Rotaru