Andromeda Media Group: #SecondLife Tip: TextureLoadFullRes

Jul 11, 2010

#SecondLife Tip: TextureLoadFullRes

Sometimes you'll notice that textures don't seem to load completely, or maybe profile pictures and icons tend to not load at all (or blurry). In Second Life, textures that are uploaded often are automatically scaled to a lower resolution than the texture that was originally created, making your glorious masterpiece of pixel creation seem less crisp than you intended. Of course, there is always the option to Rebake Textures (CTRL ALT R) if the textures in question are on your avatar, but what about all of the other textures in Second Life?

For people who have a decent graphics card (at least 512MB and higher) there is a debug setting to load those at the full resolution (in most cases) and not the default scaled resolution. While this method will make your GPU work a bit harder in the process, quite often you'll see a definite gain in how textures look in Second Life by enabling it. Keep in mind, this does not make lower resolution textures suddenly higher resolution, but if the texture was uploaded to SecondLife in a higher resolution than the standard 512x512 there is a chance this trick will bring that HD quality out (except in terms of the terrain... which seems to be stuck at 512x512)