Textures

**Textures** are image maps that overlays polygon meshes. This can either be a prop or clothing mesh. To create these textures, designers use an image editor application such as Adobe Photoshop, GIMP or Paint.NET. Designers usually start out with a UV map as a template (which outlines the mesh) and draws over this on a separate layer. Sometimes reference textures are used as well to know exactly where something is located for a more visual approach.

There are plenty of resources on the internet to get you started creating custom textures, especially in the Utherverse forums.

Note that textures that are applied to the construction of a property template are not covered on this page, please see the World Texture Editor page for more information about these.

## Photo Editing Software

You can use a variety of software to make textures and images.

* GIMP
* Photoshop
* Paint.Net
* Paint

## Texture sizes and preventing black borders

### Proper dimensions (prevent black borders)

First of all, the dimensions (width and height) of a texture need to be a power of two.

This means sizes like 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc. The reason for this is the way images are handled by your video card. It is possible to use other image dimensions, but you will see black edges on your props if your texture detail is not set to high. (Texture detail is in your settings in world. It can be set to low, medium, or high.)

The minimum texture size is 8x8.

If you need to use an image that is not the right size, you can open it in an image editing program and resize it. Try to find the closest power of two size to the original image size. For example, if the image is 224x137, you would probably want to make it 256x128. It does not matter if the image looks a little stretched or squashed. You can correct this by scaling the prop in world.

If you do not follow this rule, anyone with their texture detail set to low or medium will see black borders around all of your textures and they will not fit your props.

### Texture size (reduce lag, prevent crash or hang while loading)

The next thing you need to account for, and possibly the most important, is the image's size. Remember, smaller is better! All textures have to be loaded onto your computer's video card. There is limited memory to load these textures.

Video cards on average these days have between 128MB and 1024MB of video memory. If you, or someone you want to visit your property, does not have enough video memory to load all of the textures, bad things will happen. Usually, they will crash out of the world while loading and not be able to enter the property at all.

You have to also remember that there are a lot of other things already taking up room on the video card, such as character avatars, the interface, and everything else that you can see on the screen.

So on a 128MB video card, you may only have 80MB or less actually available for your custom textures.

### Misconceptions

It is a common belief by many people that the size of an image file is related to the memory it uses when it is loaded. This is not correct. Images are compressed when saved to reduce storage space usage and to speed downloads.

However, for an image to be loaded and displayed on your screen, it has to be uncompressed. So, the size of the file will almost always be smaller (usually significantly smaller) than the size of the image in your video card's memory.

### How it actually works

There are two things that determine the amount of memory a texture will require: the size of the image and the color depth of the image.

Usually, a JPG is 24 bit (3 byte) color depth, and a PNG is 32 bit (4 byte) color depth (PNG is larger because it allows transparency).

The total number of bytes an image uses is its width times its height times its color depth in bytes (W x H x C). So a 128x128 PNG is 0.06MB, while a 256x256 PNG is 0.25MB, or 4 times as large.

The memory requirement grows very quickly as the image size grows. A 1024x1024 PNG takes a full 4MB. It wouldn't take that many of those to kill a 128MB video card!

## Choosing a size

The important thing to remember when choosing a size for a texture is that the image will be stretched to fit whatever prop you put it on, regardless of its size. The size of the prop determines how big it looks in world, not the size of the texture. So, if you make a 128x128 texture, then shrink it to 64x64, and you cannot tell the difference in world, by all means use the smaller one.

Common texture sizes that are used are 128x128 for smaller or less detailed props and 256x256 for larger or more detailed props. Sometimes you can get away with 64x64 and still have a good looking texture. Large images like 512x512 should only be used in rare cases where a large amount of detail needs to be preserved for the texture to look right in world. If you just need a solid color, you can actually make a 1x1 or 2x2 image and it will still cover the whole object.

### Common texture sizes and their memory requirements

Size of Image - Memory as 24 bit JPG - Memory as 32 bit PNG. The following table is a table with file sizes of textures. Important to note that these sizes also have been compressed and optimized as much as possible.
These are not the only image sizes you can use, they are just some common ones.

### File Size (speed loading time)

The last thing to consider is the file size of an image.

All images have to download from the internet before they can be displayed in world. So, the smaller a file is, the faster it will download. These savings can quickly add up when you enter a region and have lots of things to download all at once.

The best way to make the file smaller is to make the image smaller. In addition to this, you can also compress the image file. JPG images usually offer the best compression, but may make small errors in the image if you look at it closely. Usually, however, this is not noticeable unless you really get close and study the image.

PNG will compress an image without affecting the quality at all, but generally the compression is not as good. Also, JPG images will not save transparency, so you need to use PNG if there is transparency in the image.

## Hosting and compression

One thing to understand that if you upload images to websites, outside of Utherverse they might have image compression on. This means that a system will automatically resize images, to certain dimensions. They do this to prevent huge amount of data being uploaded and consumed. This happens mostly with big hosting websites such as Photobucket.

You are free to choose your own hosting location. In general to have the most control a personal website would be recommended. However, for the benefit of the community Utherverse always recommends UtherBucket.

### UtherBucket

UtherBucket exists to upload larger files. However, it's still be good to use proper dimensions required by the texture you putting it on. The benefit of hosting your textures on UtherBucket makes sure that on the long term your textures will not be lost, and people can enjoy your decorated places for a long time. Other services have often failed in the past, or changed their policy to require you to start paying for hosting.

### Closet

While UtherBucket allows for rather large image sizes, when uploading textures to the closet, some compression occurs on Utherverse's end to prevent overly large files. A good think to also keep in mind, is that when you design a clothing item, you clearly will get more detail of your textures is 2048x2048. However, this rather insane to be doing for a pair of earrings. The clothing meshes already have set pixel dimensions meaning you shouldn't put any textures on them when they are larger then the mesh could handle. Most clothing items within Utherverse have a dimension of 512x512, legs, skin and torso, have 1024x1024. Smaller items such as earrings would benefit of textures of 128x128. If you upload larger images the automatic reduction can cause blurryness to your uploaded outfits.

*But Utherverse has 2048x2048 texture maps in the designer kit ...*

Yes this is correct, this is done to make sure designers have an optimal canvas to work from. Best practices still dictate that when you are done with your texture, you would size it correctly down to the size the clothing mesh requires, to prevent loss or blurryness of the texture.

### **Utherverse photo album**

This might be the worst place to upload textures. First of all anything uploaded here is sized to 500x500 pixels max. It is also highly compressed to save space on Utherverse server backend. This is fine as a picture album for people to browse on your profile but as a texture hosting service this is not recommended at all.

## Optimization

For those who use Photoshop, the best way to reduce file sizes is to save your texture as "Save for web ..." this optimizes the image size to the smallest possible.

If you want to optimize your images and you are not sure yourself how to optimize them, or use another program other then Photoshop, it is useful to use a website compresspng.com or imagecompressor.com, or an application such as the free Riot Optimizer to compress your images and textures.