How Will 2K Textures Affect Mesh Heads/Bodies?

[Cristiano Midnight]

With 2k support now live (and coming soon(TM) in Firestorm). how will this affect mesh bodies/heads? Will we get new 2k skins? I assume BoM has not been updated, but will they work with appliers?

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

6 minutes ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

With 2k support now live (and coming soon(TM) in Firestorm). how will this affect mesh bodies/heads? Will we get new 2k skins? I assume BoM has not been updated, but will they work with appliers?

🤣

I'd assume that as far as appliers are concerned they'll work just the same as any other resolution of texture.  As for BOM I'd hope that LL are planning to support 2k textures otherwise it would be a huge waste of all the time they spent developing the feature since people will flock back to appliers in droves if it means nicer/more detailed skins for their avatars.

[Cristiano Midnight]

2 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

🤣

I'd assume that as far as appliers are concerned they'll work just the same as any other resolution of texture.  As for BOM I'd hope that LL are planning to support 2k textures otherwise it would be a huge waste of all the time they spent developing the feature since people will flock back to appliers in droves if it means nicer/more detailed skins for their avatars.

My only concern with 2k skins is we are going to teeter head first into the uncanny valley if skins get much more photo realistic. I will wait and see.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

3 minutes ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

My only concern with 2k skins is we are going to teeter head first into the uncanny valley if skins get much more photo realistic. I will wait and see.

There is that possibility but I suspect that there are enough other factors holding SL back from achieving that level of realism that it won't be too much of an issue.

My main concern is more that people are going to be uploading 2k textures of fabric swatches then tiling them over objects and clothing at sizes so small that you'd have to fill your entire screen with a button just to notice all the detail.  I know LL have taken steps to ensure that the viewer only loads textures at "appropriate" resolutions but since I haven't really gotten to experience how effective those steps are yet I'm still a little skeptical.

[Luna Bliss]

I live in uncanny valley and welcome its future appearance in Second Life... 

[Luna Bliss]

14 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

My main concern is more that people are going to be uploading 2k textures of fabric swatches then tiling them over objects and clothing at sizes so small that you'd have to fill your entire screen with a button just to notice all the detail. 

I wish all creators would be required to take classes at Builder's Brewery where appropriate texturing is focused on,  but my wishing will do no good  

[Love Zhaoying]

Are people having trouble "getting their head wrapped around" these 2K textures?

Or, are people having trouble getting these 2K textures wrapped around their head?

 

[Rowan Amore]

The BOM skins now are already too detailed, IMO.  Try finding one in a dark shade that doesn't have pores you can almost see across the room.  We spend a lot of money on products to shrink those in RL and now we have them in SL?  Hard pass.for me.

[Modulated]

Probably be great for marketing and that's probably all. lol

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

5 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

The BOM skins now are already too detailed, IMO.  Try finding one in a dark shade that doesn't have pores you can almost see across the room.  We spend a lot of money on products to shrink those in RL and now we have them in SL?  Hard pass.for me.

Funnily enough 2k textures should  theoretically fix that since the pixel density is higher so skin pores can be one quarter of the size that they are on a 1024x1024 skin.

[Codex Alpha]

2 minutes ago, Modulated said:

Probably be great for marketing and that's probably all. lol

It's rewarded with sales, amongst other deceptive practices, so that's why it's done. It works. Anyone who has had to take or sit through sales courses or conferences know there's a scummy deceptive (even insulting) base to it that underscores "Just get the sale" at any cost.

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Try finding one in a dark shade that doesn't have pores you can almost see across the room. 

..use more "pancake" makeup?

[Modulated]

3 minutes ago, Codex Alpha said:

It's rewarded with sales, amongst other deceptive practices, so that's why it's done. It works. Anyone who has had to take or sit through sales courses or conferences know there's a scummy deceptive (even insulting) base to it that underscores "Just get the sale" at any cost.

Same as a creator that had a "4k resolution" head some months back...it's all smoke and mirrors. Btw, I keep textures limited to 512 in FS under the rendering prefs, this is going to be especially handy now since everyone and their mom is about unleash these 2k textures upon everything.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

My only concern with 2k skins is we are going to teeter head first into the uncanny valley if skins get much more photo realistic. I will wait and see.

Most people will be too bogged down in constant texture thrash blurryness and world-of-grey waiting for the 2k's to dl and rez, to even see the uncanny valley.

2k texture = FOUR times the pixels, and FOUR times the streaming time, and FOUR times the VRAM usage. So unless LL are promising to give away new GPU cards with a "FOUR times your old VRAM" guarantee, it's going to cause problems.

 

[Istelathis]

7 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Most people will be too bogged down in constant texture thrash blurryness and world-of-grey waiting for the 2k's to dl and rez, to even see the uncanny valley.

2k texture = FOUR times the pixels, and FOUR times the streaming time, and FOUR times the VRAM usage. So unless LL are promising to give away new GPU cards with a "FOUR times your old VRAM" guarantee, it's going to cause problems.

 

It won't be a problem if you spend most of your time zooming in on your face to appreciate some of them sweeet, sweet, 2k textures 😋🪿

[Extrude Ragu]

The devs in the discord seem pretty confident the viewer will never download the full 2k texture most of the time and performance shouldn't be impacted, but I don't have the time or resources to test those statements so i'm just🤞 that they turn out to be right.

I think from what I understand from discord, even if you are zoomed way into an object with 2k textures it won't delay the time to display, because it downloads one discard level after another. ie. you'll just see 512px... 1k... finally 2k as it downloads. Someone with more knowledge about the ongoing dev work feel free to correct me if i've understood that wrong.

[Kristy Aurelia]

Do people not read patch notes?

Quote

2k textures for Bakes on Mesh (BoM) is coming, meanwhile, please do not start creating 2k onion skin avatars.

Source: https://releasenotes.secondlife.com/viewer/7.1.8.9375512768.html

[Zalificent Corvinus]

41 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

The devs in the discord seem pretty confident the viewer will

Same devs who were pretty confident late last year that PBR was "finished and working as intended, with no fixes needed and ready to roll out"?

Yeah right.

43 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Someone with more knowledge about the ongoing dev work

I'd rather hear the opinion of somebody who has read the JPEG2000 file specification, and understands the format does NOT support any kind of "mip mapping".

"JPEG 2000 provides efficient codestream organizations which are progressive by pixel accuracy and by image resolution (or by image size). This way, after a smaller part of the whole file has been received, the viewer can see a lower quality version of the final picture. The quality then improves progressively through downloading more data bits from the source."

 

Translation, you don't get sent a 512 version, and then a 1024 version and then a 2048 version, you get sent a 2048 version with SUPERR DUPER LOSSY COMPRESSION OF BLURRY AWFULNESS, which gradually sharpens as more of the FULL file is downloaded.

That's why "texture thrashing" looks the way it does, they show you the full sized super duper lossy version, then the super lossy version then the regular lossy version, that's why "texture thrashing" runs from horribly blurry to sort of sharp, and then back to blurry as the texture gets unloaded and reloaded because VRAM is full.

 

So what the devs are apparently claiming for JPEG2000 seems to contradict what the actual JPEG2000 file specification says it does, and what JPEG2000's have done in SL for the last 21 years.

 

This does not leave me hopeful at all.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

23 minutes ago, Kristy Aurelia said:

Do people not read patch notes?

No, they really don't.

Why would you expect them to?

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

With 2k support now live (and coming soon(TM) in Firestorm). how will this affect mesh bodies/heads? Will we get new 2k skins? I assume BoM has not been updated, but will they work with appliers?

2K BOM support is planned.

https://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests/p/update-the-bake-service-bakes-on-mesh-for-2k-textureshttps://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests/p/update-the-bake-service-bakes-on-mesh-for-2k-textures

[Coffee Pancake]

10 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

because VRAM is full.

VRAM is not full. The amount the viewer has arbitrarily decided it's going to use for textures is approaching full.

This amount of VRAM is only a small portion of the total in use by the viewer (meshes have their own section) and the entire system use of VRAM.

Many of the problems the viewer has concerning VRAM are because the viewer doesn't operate under the assumption it's the only application running (unlike games). This desire to be friendly to other running applications, combined with a lack of solid ways to find out the true state of a systems VRAM* means the SL viewer errs on the side of caution. It's never using all your VRAM, or anything close to it.

* Some hardware will actively lie about how much VRAM it has.

TPVs tend to allow more VRAM to be used than the official viewer.

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

51 minutes ago, Kristy Aurelia said:

Do people not read patch notes?

I remember a TPV dev, being told about a stealthed 32m hike in draw distance for "large architectural prims" introduced in one server roll out, and mentioned in the patch notes, and then the TPV dev stating they had never heard of it, and didn't believe it, until they tried rezzing 11 m cubes and seeing how far outside their set DD the damn things were still visible.

 

Almost nobody reads LL patch notes, ever.

 

[Anna Salyx]

8 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

As for BOM I'd hope that LL are planning to support 2k textures otherwise it would be a huge waste of all the time they spent developing the feature since people will flock back to appliers in droves if it means nicer/more detailed skins for their avatars.

I believe, as others have also commented, that 2K BOM is in the works, just no ETA on when it'll land.  And even if it doesn't, no I won't flock back to appliers.  I regularly have about 30ish "tattoo" layers on at any given time. From skin, to makeup, moles and freckles, and actual tattoos. All carefully layered.  I'm not giving that up to back to a dodgy applier system that gives you 4 layers at best and you have to figure out to make the alpha channels play nice.  nope, not happening. 

7 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

The devs in the discord seem pretty confident the viewer will never download the full 2k texture most of the time and performance shouldn't be impacted, but I don't have the time or resources to test those statements so i'm just🤞 that they turn out to be right.

I think from what I understand from discord, even if you are zoomed way into an object with 2k textures it won't delay the time to display, because it downloads one discard level after another. ie. you'll just see 512px... 1k... finally 2k as it downloads. Someone with more knowledge about the ongoing dev work feel free to correct me if i've understood that wrong.

6 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

I'd rather hear the opinion of somebody who has read the JPEG2000 file specification, and understands the format does NOT support any kind of "mip mapping".

"JPEG 2000 provides efficient codestream organizations which are progressive by pixel accuracy and by image resolution (or by image size). This way, after a smaller part of the whole file has been received, the viewer can see a lower quality version of the final picture. The quality then improves progressively through downloading more data bits from the source."

Translation, you don't get sent a 512 version, and then a 1024 version and then a 2048 version, you get sent a 2048 version with SUPERR DUPER LOSSY COMPRESSION OF BLURRY AWFULNESS, which gradually sharpens as more of the FULL file is downloaded.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Image_System

Specifically talks about mip maps within the texture pipeline.  About 4 years ago in a forum post about this, Wulfie Reanimator commented:

Quote

I believe the mipmaps are created during the upload process of the texture, by the uploader.

And a post later Animats confirmed that the viewer supports mip maps but wasn't sure how/when it came into play. 

And lastly, at a fairly recently at one of the weekly Tuesday Simulator User Group meetings when the topic of 2K textures came up one of the Lindens (don't remember which, and don't remember the exact quote and don't have time to go back and scrub though a half dozen or more youtube videos, sorry) did mention (paraphrased here): that code was being put into place better utilize mip mapping so that when inevitably someone puts a 2K texture on a clothes button, that an appropriate level mip map would be served up instead of the whole 2k texture.

so all that...  and a 5 dollars will get you a cup of joe.  We'll have to see what's what when it finally starts getting wider adoption.  I'm not a nuts and bolts level techy person on this and can only offer up what I've read and heard so far for other so chew on and discuss in more depth as I try to learn.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 minutes ago, Anna Salyx said:

I believe, as others have also commented, that 2K BOM is in the works, just no ETA on when it'll land.  And even if it doesn't, no I won't flock back to appliers.  I regularly have about 30ish "tattoo" layers on at any given time. From skin, to makeup, moles and freckles, and actual tattoos. All carefully layered.  I'm not giving that up to back to a dodgy applier system that gives you 4 layers at best and you have to figure out to make the alpha channels play nice.  nope, not happening. 

That's fair!  I personally wouldn't want to swap back simply because the whole concept of onion-skinned avatars is ridiculous and should never have had to be a thing in the first place, but since LL refuse to give us proper decals and BOM is the closest we're likely to get I'm sticking with it.

That being said I suspect there are plenty of residents who'd swap to whatever allowed them to buy and use the latest skins just because "other peoples photos keep getting more likes than mine on flickr, it must be because their skins are four times nicer than the ones I'm stuck with!".

[Roxy Couturier]

9 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

The BOM skins now are already too detailed, IMO.  Try finding one in a dark shade that doesn't have pores you can almost see across the room.  We spend a lot of money on products to shrink those in RL and now we have them in SL?  Hard pass.for me.

Not to mention pepperoni nipples. You know, nips so pebbley they look like slices of pepperoni stuck to your tatas..

 

(Side note, when I first joined SL, one super popular, now defunct skin maker had the ugliest nipples with that pepperoni 'look'. Like I had someone offer to buy one of their skins and I was like.. no thanks.. I don't know if it was the high price tag that made people -want- those monstrosities on their body or if they were just hungry for pizza. )