AmberJoyBliss

Yes! I had forgotten what it is called. I bought these super low poly packs on the Unreal Marketplace and some have only one 2048 texture with every surface on it. The rendering speed is so fast.

I agree. You seem to really know what you are talking about, definitely more than I do. I suggest you and others get together and create some sort of a sticky post on best practices. And also throw in my point about the difference between planar and non-planar. I found that with walls and stairs and such for castle like builds, planar and 0.5 stretch on X & Y works very well, granted the texture has realistic "brick" sizes. That slap it on and then stretch the prim is annoying. 😇 Glad you came here on the thread Fluffy. My work here is done and time for the pros to educate the rest of us with good practices and techniques.

It took me about 15 minutes to get this right on the first go, and no more than 2 hours to establish my own method, but then again, I am not new to this. Diffuse and then AO map on soft light blending alone made a huge difference. I use this on full perm clothes as well to create depth.

I only know the difference from Unreal and the framerate difference is quite high on a low spec machine. By the end of the day, a great looking place that does not Rez and lags, is not as enjoyable as a crude design that has at least 15fps with 20 grey avatars and your friends rezzed. Not to forget the main culprit, ourselves and lack of wardrobe optimisation, but good luck with getting people on board with that.

I know very well what normal maps are. Having used the Unreal Engine for a few years, trust me, I know. With Second Life however, as soon as you have just a few avatars in one place and render settings above the lowest, the lag becomes bad. If you have two textures, both with three color channels that is twice the texture memory and also twice the downloading data required to stream in the level. If you have a house with 10 textures and 10 normal maps and they are all at 1024x1024, you now have 20 textures at a few megabytes each. This can work very well on a gaming PC and high speed internet, which many Second Life users do not have. Someone said PBR rendering is just around the corner and my prediction is that most creators will just slam things into this "new SL technology" and not understand why the FPS suddenly dropped from 60 to 15. What we need though, are packaged textures. That way we could have a diffuse, normal map and then roughness and specular on the alpha channel on either of these, or go further and put the entire thing into just one texture. I can't remember atm. exactly how that is done, but there are some ancient tricks still being used to day to lower GPU load.

Here are some of the things that boggle my mind, even from the very expensive builds around the grid. In no particular order. I will not be around much to answer, so it is up to the community to discuss professional texturing further. Most of this information comes from the world of gamedev, shader programming, and my frustrations inside Second Life. Look into planar texturing for box shaped prims. Select each face and stretch them based on the size ratio of the face. Rotate textures and flip them horizontally or vertically with a minus value to make it somewhat seamless. Do not overlap textures and/or prims, as they will flicker from some angles. Do not just accept circular surfaces and that kaleidoscope effect, try planar or the default on that particular surface. When using one texture on multi-prim builds, get the stretching and tiling correct on each prim to avoid that cheap effect from a good texture on larger prims. If you have a normal map or an ao map, bring these into Photoshop, GIMP or photopea.com and but the normal or ao on a layer above the diffuse/albedo map. For ao, leave as is and for normal, desaturate it to B/W and then invert the colors. Choose softlight, multiply or any of those, even screen and blend it in. Go wild here and try all sorts of things, roughness map, specular etc. This will give you a single texture with depth. 2048 or 1024 texture are not always required. You can go as low as 32x32 for repeated patterns. Graphics memory optimisations are an art form you must get right. For non-repetitive grass planes, rez a thin plate just above the tiled grass and find a dirt texture from the library. Stretch the dirt so it is much larger than the grass tile and bring up the transparency. This will make it look like one huge grass plane without that rectangular repetition. Test your textures under different lighting setting, as they may look great in daylight, but look bad in the other settings. Consider making your textures B/W and then use colouring in SL to give them colour. With this, you can reuse a single texture many times, move it around, stretch it, rotate it etc. and lower that lag and/or texture memory by a lot. Alphas and transparency, is heavier on the rendering. Use a professional source for your textures, who update their collections regularly. PBR packs, some of which are free and great, will include those extra maps you need to photoshop blend then into one great texture. This can also work for wet surfaces, so if it rains on your sim and then the sun comes up and lag is no issue, it might results in a unique effect, without having to use an extra prim and transparent textures for the wetness effect. As well as snow, sand, blood etc.

Update: The easiest way to achieve this effect is with only the diffuse and ao textures. Place the ao texture on a layer above the diffuse texture and blend as soft light. Alternatively, desaturate the normal texture and invert the colours and again, place it above the diffuse texture with soft light blending. For shine, icy surfaces, water etc. you can use the roughness or specular / gloss textures and try different blending methods, fx. both screen and soft light, by using the same texture on two layers and put the screen and soft light above or below.

Additionally: The SL user count is so small, that if we end up in some bundle bought by a data mining company, there is no way they will be investing in filtering our most awkward NSFW moments in our personal data file. If your most corrupted alts feed your marketing profile and it ends up in your YT feed, like on Christmas Eve with the entire large family listening and some not so decent ad suddenly blasts loud and people blame it on you, say this: “First time I hear about this, so I must ask you experts. What are they advertising and what will you use it for?”

Probably delete the account. Here is something about Google that surprised me and the YouTube algorithm: Their recommendations come from EVERYTHING you do on any google platform. Gmail, Maps, Google Earth, all of it. Not understanding this entirely, I would assume that overlapping data is probably very valuable for marketing databases. Now, imagine you have been sneaking around in SL and a family member starts watching YouTube the next day you are signed in on your google account and forgot about it. Good luck explaining your feed and ads to your RL folks. I did hear about some companies (TikTok) key logging your phone as well. My point is, do you want your inventory, profiles & picks you look at, IMs TP history etc., to be fed to marketing databases, affecting your RL, potentially, forever? We are strict about this in Europe, but LL are a US based company, so my trust in them is of course very low.

❤️

No no, you can still run, if you win, you might become the first in history Big Moe. You campaign well, even spam my thread here, and what you offer, the people want. Do not give up, or I come and make you fight and who knows, even win. 💪 Everyone in favour of Big Moe Whitfield running for President say aye. ❤️ Anyone who says otherwise, will be arrested and trained to vote for a candidate I can control. 😇

I will share it in detail soon. Normal map I desaturated into B/W and inverted either that or the roughness/specular map. One was blended with soft light and the other screen. I then duplicated the diffuse/albedo/base colour map and put that on top and blended it as colour.

You can hope all you want, or accept that better times are ahead for everyone.

I have been testing this in GIMP, where I modify the normal and specular maps and blend them with the diffuse map. Not tried the AO, displacement and other maps just yet. If anyone else here has more ideas, let's inspire each other. Diffuse on the left, mixed version on the right.

There was no such thing as debt-free and decentralised currency with widespread use, until crypto currencies came along. Not in that amount anyway. Having that said, politics are so boring, I called it off and declared myself the sole ruler of a brand new nation, where the law is written by the people without governmental interference. I can sign or veto these laws, but otherwise not pollute the process with my personal desires.I doubt any RL nation is run like that so far, with no parliament or senate, but in the hands of the people themselves, except for now it exists. First in SL and one day in RL.

I was being ironic to underline that Empress hubris. What no one here noticed, is that I am also very good at marketing. That this thread became so big, is not an accident. I did not expect much tbh. but the lesson here is from Gary Vee, to stay active in your own posts and reply, reply, reply and never ever take anything personally. One thing that bugs me about SL, is how much work people put into their events, businesses and things they want to share, with very little results. That is something I wish to help everyone with in-world, to grow SL to what it was at it's peak and not just empty traffic, but organic traffic that delivers results for both us who provide as well as those who enjoy logging on for that RL break and have a good time in SL. How I reply here, is not an accident either. Gotta feed people's attention with something to think about and then react to. In sales, they call it "call to action."

By closing the thread, I meant it is time for us all to move on. Seeing I already won this election by cancelling it and declaring myself the winner without a single vote being casted, this is my ruling: ❤️ This thread now belongs to you all and you are free to use it however you see fit, granted you respect Linden Laws and Real Life laws. ❤️ Those of you who were concerned I might end up as a tyrant, ended up being correct. ❤️ Those of who were concerned about lack of democracy, were wrong. I am going for the "Inverted Pyramid." ❤️ All those creative and funny attacks are proof once again, that nothing beats Second Life and it's citizens when it comes to creativity and intelligence. ❤️ I am still carrying out my initial plan to help both the citizens and Linden LAB (without the s,) to improve as much as we can, as fast as we can, and most importantly, without alienating those with low specs hardware. This becomes more important as energy prices soar. PBR is great, but so it paying the bills. That was all, carry on as you were, the sole ruler of Amberia has spoken. Honorable mentions: The SL Neko Party & The President For Life.

Be my guest, but if you expect me to do it for you, the fee is L$5.000.

The Amberian people have spoken. The elections have been called off and we are now a micro nation with a new type of government structure that will enable us to establish meta-verse dominance through commerce & trade. If you are exceptionally skilled and/or talented and desire to be well compensated for your contribution, please consider becoming a citizen of Amberia. If you seek a place to hang out and chat about whatever and generally waste time, this is not the place for you. To learn more, you must meet with me in-world.

Having all of that said, it is time to close this thread down, nothing left here to discuss and so much valuable information to sort through.

Simply speaking from experience, but that was years ago and once you get over it, just waking up already makes the day worth living fully. You never know when it's your last. Might as well do as much what you can with the time we have here, so why not do it all, especially in a place like SL where we literally can. If anything, we have more or less generated tons of comedy here, so that is definitely a win.

To all those who are annoyed over my post: Do you live in a home? Can you afford to eat? If the answer to both questions is yes, you are very fortunate. If I really annoy you this much, you should take a break from the internet, appreciate life while you still have it and then come back and simply forget that I exist. ❤️

Doesn't mean it has to stay that way forever.

Of course not after such short time and so far all by myself with this. It will probably take 2 weeks to get the entire vision presented properly.

Five days notice is concerning.