Phat Dufaux

I've been texturing a complicated build which includes several Mega and Sculpty Prims with touchy tiling texturing. So, I have had to make some compound textures (my terminology, please tell me if there is already a "term of art" for slicing a huge texture 1536x512 into 3 512x512's), to be spread between 3 horizontally adjacent prim.

The question: From the Visitors' standpoint, is it a faster load to have one 1536x512 texture applied to the three prims (offset appropriately); or, three seperate 512x512 texture slices one apply to each of the three prims?

Thanks in advance.

Phat

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SL URL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Skybox%20Nirvana/49/97/421

Jahar Aabye

Well, for starters, you can't upload a 1536x512 texture. All uploaded textures are clamped to 1024x1024. If you upload the texture as-is, it'll become 1024x1024 and the aspect ratio will be thrown off, or in layman's terms, the image will be smooshed.

Now, it is usually going to be faster to have to load only one texture as opposed to three textures. Three small textures may, in some circumstances, load faster than one large texture, depending on the exact dimensions, but in this situation it would probably be better to go with a single texture.

Additionally, the dimensions of the texture will also affect load time. a 1024x1024 texture will take far longer to load than a 512x512 texture would, although in this case I guess it'd be a 1024x342 and 512x171 respectively. And while a 1024 texture might sound better, remember that even someone running a 1280x1024 resolution would pretty much have to have the texture take up their entire screen for the increased resolution to make any difference, because they literally wouldn't have enough pixels otherwise.

Also, sculpties and megas do take a bit of extra time to render, but it sounds like that's not really changeable in this setup.


So yeah, try to use as few textures as possible, and try to make them as small as necessary.

WarKirby Magojiro

Important. Always use as few texures as possible.

In the example you've mentioned, you want to make a texture atlas for the build. Do it something like this




Put any other textures you're using in the build, in the extra space in the lower right, don't waste any space, and be as efficient as possible.

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Miriel Enfield

Always use as few pixels as possible. All other things being roughly equal, it's probably better to use fewer textures (though this can raise your own workload substantially), but generally, get your texture sizes down first, and then worry about numbers of textures.