How To Upload Pictures On Firestorm

Last calendar week's postal service on improving SL image quality via a workaround from SLer Frenchbloke Vanmoer caused a lot of skepticism, mostly due to some poor technical wording on my function. (My bad and mea culpa!) However, Firestorm support and QA volunteer Whirly Fizzle came by Comments, and confirmed that this does, indeed, evidently piece of work:

When I first read this weblog post I thought information technology was a load of cobblers. Just Frenchbloke is actually correct! The blog post just explains it desperately. [Sorry! - ed]

This will also work just as well on the Linden Lab viewer & probably every other viewer. Those debug settings are from the Linden Lab viewer, they are non Firestorm specific.

It's easy enough to test for yourself. Become concur of a super high quality 8192 image with lots of fine detail & make sure it's saved in a lossless format - I used PNG in my exam.

Ready the debugs max_texture_dimension_X and max_texture_dimension_Y to 8192.
Upload your 8192x8192 epitome.
This prototype will upload and the uploader will resize the image to the maximum allowed size of 1024x1024 - this limit is enforced server side, there is no mode around it.

Now open up your 8192 PNG in Photoshop & reduce the image size to 12.v% using the Bicubic Sharpen (best for reduction) & relieve this image.
Set the debugs max_texture_dimension_X and max_texture_dimension_Y back to default & upload your image.

More than from Mr. Fizzle, including a sample comparing images they took:

Compare these 2 uploaded textures side by side.

The 8192 texture resized by the uploader is much sharper, has less racket & the highlights pop more then the texture that was 1024 before upload.

I'grand quite surprised the uploader makes a meliorate chore of the resize and so Photoshop tbh.

I asked one of the Firestorm developers what was going on here & they are still investigating, merely initially the idea is that this trick has more validity then information technology showtime seems.
Y'all give the viewer a texture to upload & it's converted to a 1024x1024 j2k texture (JPEG 2000).
If you upload a 1024, the j2k compression goes through and does lossy pinch on the information you lot give it.
If you upload a 8192 (allowed by irresolute those debug settings) the viewer will apply the same lossy compression, except this fourth dimension information technology has eight times the quality on input with which to work.

Also to note, using this play tricks will non cause any extra "lag" - the uploaded 8102 x8192 image is even so 1024x1024 afterwards upload...

This prototype shows ii textures uploaded on the LL viewer side by side viewed in the texture preview floaters.

On the left is the original 8192 PNG image uploaded by changing the debug settings.

On the right is the same PNG reduced to 1024 in Photoshop using Bicubic Sharpen (best for reduction) before upload.

Information technology's pretty obvious the 8192 texture on the left is better quality even though both images after upload are 1024x1024.

Likewise note that the Photoshop resized 1024 epitome does not have all the compression artifacts you can see in the right uploaded texture when viewed in Windows photo viewer.
Photoshop did a fine task at resizing the texture.
The viewer upload/compression/resize conspicuously reduces quality much more when uploading the 1024 prototype and so it does when uploading the 8192 image.

Whirly Fizzle
Firestorm support & QA.

And there's a whole forum thread on this from Beq Janus going into further detail, and at that place's even more detail and discussion in the original postal service's Comments thread.

Source: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/02/high-res-textures-firestorm-second-life.html

Posted by: martinjusbancief.blogspot.com

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