Frenchbloke Vanmoer

When materials first appeared I was in the Caledon sandbox. There was concern that using three textures on 1 was the work of the devil so it was suggested that to make it less of a resource hog why not make the normals and spec layers smaller. Picture the scene, a 1024 diffuse brick wall with some cracks. Then the materials that were 512. It wasn't pretty

"accidental" shiny No mod and no way to fix it. And no desire by some creators to fix it. Fortunately a lot of creators will either fix it and send a new one or or in the case of Kauna - a full mod version

I just remembered I had this. A really nice full perm porthole that is literally impossible to make look as if it came from this decade, texture-wise.

some genius came up with the notion that using a lower resolution materials layers than the original texture - he alone deserves an article. That was not a pretty sandbox, I can tell you Impossible to match baked in sunlight and shadows has to be included surely ? visible seams

also - no mod on "accidental" shiny things like this, from a well known gentleman's outfitter Behold - shiny wool or maybe it's wet ? Varnish ? https://gyazo.com/e818d993ca7ad1b9093db37d81e233f0

you mean sub maps ? unless you're one of those mad people who makes sprites

can I add Still using the Half Life 2 game rip textures from 10 + years ago on builds Scale - this falls under texel density but is an annoyance of mine regarding bricks and objects that cannot be larger than their RL equivalents Shiny everything.

I remember seeing that one. You can get all manner of great images fiddling with the phototools menu. I'm fond of making silhouettes from windlight settings

if you change the bit where it says "color" to depth, there's a world of fun with the filters

When it comes to second life everything that is straightforward in every other pbr enabled world is rather less than straightforward. A lot of downright cheating is involved. Try to make a semi transparent liquid that reflects the environment. Not going to happen unless you cheat. The only time I have seen metal actually look metal is with an environmental cube mapped projection. "shininess" is seen as a gimmick. Which is why you'll see shiny wool, shiny carpet, shiny stone, shiny everything. And usually either set to 51 by default or whacked up full. Getting things to look halfway right once you've rezzed it and got the windlight /lightning correct is a win What looks "ooh" in Substance can look ".. Oh.." in second life. Not everyone has experience of 3d engines beyond Linden Labs and just want things to look how they want it to. So giving them the knowledge that white =shiny, black =no shine at all and everything in between is everything in between is often enough to get people experimenting and trying it for themselves.

shiny shiny have you had a look at https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/StandardShaderMaterialCharts.html ? your problem is the "color" The specular colour that is which will be the colour reflected back when light hits - by default this would be white which can make things look a tad metallic. You need to experiment with shades https://www.flickr.com/photos/galleriedufromage/shares/Dt7a45 shows the defaults of using white in the color and changing just the shininess value and and then the same thing changing the color from white to varying shades of grey all the way down to black, black meaning no shine whatsoever. Specular materials are often misused and misunderstood

I think there's an option for previewing it in Substance Player ( I know it's in Designer) which you can export from there if that helps ?

This is where Texel Density comes into play. In games what you see up close and personal are the high resolution textures - the things you don't interact with - say the underside of a car, the top of tall buildings you can't otherwise gain access to, things waaay over there - that kind of thing - those should be lower. This maybe Maya specific but the general rules apply : https://80.lv/articles/textel-density-tutorial/ , another is http://forums.joinsquad.com/topic/23545-3d2d-setting-up-your-texel-density/ I'd say more or less anyone who has slapped a texture on a prim has been guilty of this. There's nothing worse than seeing pic on Flickr of a high res avatar dressed in all sorts of finery that someone has taken weeks to create standing in front of a texture that looks like it hadn't rezzed completely, only to then discover that is how the creator of that object intended for it to look. It's not pretty. Of course it may be only me that gets annoyed and develops a twitch when confronted with terrible use of textures, lazy mirrored texture jobs, materials layers that look like they had been made for 256 x 256 textures covering 20 metres or so, worse still, shiny everything ( which is just as bad as full bright on a no-mod item), materials that look as if 6 inches of tar was coating everything ( maybe it's a trendy thing, I dunno). There is an entirely different argument for photographic backgrounds having high res textures solely as they generally tend to be temporarily rezzed items that people have , strike a pose, save the snapshot and put it away. It's intended to be looked at in every which way. SL is kind of a wild west for standards, or lack thereof. It's up to the users to fix it, which may be like setting fire to the stables after all the horses ran away or something. Sadly we just accept the things with the shiny everything , but it's mod so we can fix it, the wonky texture job that is salvageable and so on and so forth and don't call the creators out when they make a mistake or blatantly think they can get away with it. Something fun to try is seeing which of the big clothing creators forgot to turn shine off on something that's no mod and not meant to be shiny. ( it happens from time to time and usually by accident )

I just like poking around

My main reason for looking into this was curiosity. I had discovered a few years ago that Firestorms default was 2048x2048 when previously I had been scaling down everything for 1024s. I did some tests with materials to put an end to the myth that was banded about when materials first appeared in SL by some eejits that sticking lo-res norms and spec layers work with higher res textures. For your eyes sake please don't don't do this. Anyway, I noticed some improvement in quality in the 2K upload tests ( I did 256, 512, 1024 and 2048) which I have stuck to ever since. Poking about the debug settings ( who doesn't ?) I was looking to turn off the texture upload confirmation window - you know, the you paid $10L one, turned that off ( nothing worse when uploading a lot of textures in bulk) and then went looking for anything else texture related. The pictures used of the face in the NWN article are in the wrong order and a chance is that you mistook the 8K one for the 1K one. I was looking to see how fine a detail you could get on a mesh head as heads as we all know and should have, contain very fine details, wrinkles and knobbly bits. I deliberately made a normal for it with hairline cracks and some larger ones to see which ones would appear and which ones wouldn't. The area near the mouth and cheek has a very fine "crack" that radiates in a fork upwards and down. in the 1K it's clearly visible and nothing like the original. In the 8K, it's very faint - some of it isn't actually visible but what was made me realise that facial wrinkles, creases, pores, lines, stubble and importantly, eyebrows that aren't a mass of pixellated blergh are technically possible to the right person with the right skills. https://www.flickr.com/photos/galleriedufromage/shares/T8Y29f same flickr has several earlier tests of higher res uploads. The audio comparison above is quite right - you can't make a lossless audio file transcoded from a 128kbps mp3 - well, you can but it'll sound awful. The old rule of Better Quality In = Better Quality Out applies.

I too have to suffer the indignation of wearing the body of a regular gym goer under my clothing. Whilst my face is as old as the very hills themselves there is no love amongst content creators for those who want to avoid the boy band/male model/steroid abuse look. There are skins a plenty ( thank you Ruby) but a lack of mesh shapes and don't get me started on mesh heads. i mean, really, why would anyone put an older skin, albeit fantastically detailed, onto the shape of someone in their 20's ? Where are the jowls ? the wattle ? the saggy eyes ? the love handles?, the nose hair, well, maybe pass on the nose hair, but you get what I'm saying. Hopefully someone out there is working on a range of bodies that gravity has given up on and heads with wrinkles, creases and double chins. We don't all want to look like the svelte adonis. Some of us want to be ourselves, older, wiser, with bilateral hearing loss.... Go on, someone take up the challenge.