AC3D Forums - View Single Post - Second Life Sculpted Prim TGA Resolution Question

lisa · 25th August 2007, 03:10 AM

There's no user-configurable option to do so. Technically speaking, Second Life won't use a sculpt map above 32x32, as this already results in 1024 vertices in the mesh... as much as a torus, which is the other heaviest shape. At a distance, SL drops the resolution to 16x16, or 256 vertices. The maps generated by the exporter are at 64x64--even though SL can't actually render this--by recommendation of Qarl Linden. I assume this is both for future-proofing and to get a little bit of oversampling to hide the artifacts. A 512 map would be over a quarter of a million vertices, way too much for the SL renderer to handle even if they'd let you; and ironically, it will still have artifacts, as the issue is the limited numerical precision, not the texture resolution.

For what it's worth, internally the plug-in actually renders the image at a higher resolution and downsamples it to 64x64 to smooth the output.

Just curious, what are you wanting to do with a 512 map?

25th August 2007, 03:10 AM	#2
lisa Senior Member Professional user Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Phoenix, AZ Posts: 917	Re: Second Life Sculpted Prim TGA Resolution Question There's no user-configurable option to do so. Technically speaking, Second Life won't use a sculpt map above 32x32, as this already results in 1024 vertices in the mesh... as much as a torus, which is the other heaviest shape. At a distance, SL drops the resolution to 16x16, or 256 vertices. The maps generated by the exporter are at 64x64--even though SL can't actually render this--by recommendation of Qarl Linden. I assume this is both for future-proofing and to get a little bit of oversampling to hide the artifacts. A 512 map would be over a quarter of a million vertices, way too much for the SL renderer to handle even if they'd let you; and ironically, it will still have artifacts, as the issue is the limited numerical precision, not the texture resolution. For what it's worth, internally the plug-in actually renders the image at a higher resolution and downsamples it to 64x64 to smooth the output. Just curious, what are you wanting to do with a 512 map?