Over the last two week period Burniversity has had a wonderful series of seminars dealing with the creations of Texture's. The first week we had talks on the topics of Basic texture creation and application my myself (Nyx Breen) and specific discussion on Maps and meshes by Infinview Merit and Vryl Valkyrie discussed the basics of texturing and the steps in making seamless and tilable textures. It was a well attended seminar and alot of great information and feebees where available. At the end of the blog I wil past the links to sites that where mentioned. Sadly I crashed and lost the chat logs of the seminar but I am working on getting a copy of them.
The second portion of the texture seminar had myself and Raphaella Nighfire and Starship jefferson as guest speakers the topics discussed ranged from textures and lighting to textures for clothes and Starship them was the 10 things I wish I knew when I first started making textures. The good news is we do have the chat logs condensed of this seminar. I will post them in the blog.
I want to tahnk all of the artist for their time and gifts thay gave, Infinivie and Vryl where most kind with info and freebees, Raphaella and Starship where just as kind and giving in time effort and gifts for all who attended the Burniversity learning seminars.
As for my self it was a truly enjoyable time to work with such talented individuals and share the experiences we have in SL. All of these individuals are in world creators and earn an income from Sl, yet not one asked for or expected a thing in return. Each and every one believed i tto be a special honor to share what they love with all in Sl as I do with the time I spend at Burn U and on the blog here.
Thanks to all and hers the chat we do have from the second texture seminar at Burn U.
Nyx Breen topic textures and lighting and settings:
Hello and welcome to Burniversity and the continuation of the Texture Seminar.
After the strong response and recommendations for more on texturing we are continuing with texturing part II.
This week we will be addressing a few new subjects that are part of the texture creation world.
How to light prims after they are textured, Low lag textures, textures for clothing and 10 things you need to know about texturing.
We have some great texture artist with us this week, Raphaella Nightfire a great clothing creator who has done some wickedly wonderful things with textures for clothes and Starship Jefferson who has made one of my personally favorite sets of textures and is a master of Photoshop and the magic than can be done with it.
As I stated last week I am not a texture master but I do know a few basic rules to follow when creating and using textures in-world.
As you many of you may know I am in the UWA art and Design Challenge contest and one of my favorite builds in the UWA flagship Challenge was the design I made in January of this year. Besides the winning design the part I enjoyed the most was the use of lights and lighting/shadow effects throughout the build. From outside lighting of the build to shadows and sunbeams streaming through the upper floor windows. The build had a very real life light scheme to it and was a lot of fun to do and see especially at the midnight setting when you walked from one part of it to another.
The use of lights and lighting/shadow effects can take a build to an other level of complexity. Using the settings in the build/edit box in SL allows for many different effects. As with all things less is more with lighting effects.
There is nothing worse than a build that is over exposed with lights or even worse GLOW set to a maximum brightness effect. It looks like crap plain and simple to any one who has a good graphics card and their shaders turned on.
GLOW IS NOT GOOD set to max bright, please all glow whores read this and understand we do talk about how bad your art and builds looked with the over kill of glow on them!
In the edit/build menu the "features" tab allows you to set the effects for light on prims, You can control the intensity, radius and fall off along with the color you want the prim to be.
The intensity will control how bright it will be when you come close to the prim.
radius is how far the light will spread out and be seen.
fall off is how the light that is cast from the prim dissipates as it gets farther from the prim center.
Finally the light can have a different color than the color of the prim itself. This does allow for some great effects.
To properly see these effect you need to make sure that you Graphics settings are set to Nearby Local Lights. It also helps to have on the shaders and bump, mapping, shiny settings also. Depending on your computer and its graphics card ability will determine how High you set your quality and performance settings.
In summation this will allow you to have a multitude of light effects from color to distance and brightness a light can be seen in world.
Theres one other setting on the edit tabs
One of the best ways to get a good feel of how lights are working in a build is to walk through it and see how they look as you pass by them. I have always been an advocate of walking the build and getting a feel for how it flows over just camming it.
So take your time and make sure it feels and looks right and remember less is more when using lights in your build.
Also there was a discussion on graphic card settings in the SL viewer if you go to the Burn U LM - grab one from the notice board at the Burniversity group you will find prims with the textures settings on them.
Next came Raphaella...
Texture Seminar guest speaker Raphaella Nightfire discussing the creation of textures for clothing. As Raphella had 35 or so avatars all topless and in appearance mode we join the conversation. :)
1) What are templates?
Templates are an outline; a shape of a clothing article which the designer draws onto the avatar mesh provided in your inventory library under 'textures' then Avatar Body and Clothing Templates:
2) How to Use templates:
Locate the Avatar, Body & Clothing Templates...
Go into appearance mode, select - shirt. remove whatever you have on, then click to make new shirt - you will see a top box.. for the texture - under that a 'tint' box
In appearance edit mode, make a new shirt by selecting 'Upper Body Template'. This shows how the templates are made, with seam lines and contour lines on the actual avatar body.
I recommend you photograph your avatar in this template. It will be an invaluable reference on stretch and seams as you progress to designing clothing.
3) SAVE the templates on your hard drive. Next pull up the skirt, lower body and upper body templates click on each texture, then go to top left of your screen, click 'file' then 'save texture as' ....(name it something you will recognize and what part it is).
The textures are now available for you to start designing.
I WOULD SUGGEST.. You do a You Tube search / Second Life Clothing Designs there are lots of great tutorials and videos to watch and learn from.
4) How to get depth and 3d effects on clothing
Using the templates you can of course just lay a fabric over the template, shape using your cut tool, save that layer as eg: first shirt, upload in world and wear. But clothing is not 'flat'. It has depth and light, shade and wrinkles. These are respectively applied in layers.
You can do this by:
Applying a body shade layer over the fabric, then decrease the opacity level. Once you have the layer to the shading set, copy the fabric layer and place over the shading then use the opacity filters to get the effect you want. (applying various blending modes helps also and increases the options available to you).
So now cut the fabric to shape on the template, apply the shaders so you have the body shape under it. Next apply wrinkling or shadow layers. There are a couple of ways to applying a wrinkle or shadow layer by using the burn or dodge tool then blur it or make it opaque to the effect you want.
Or get out the premade Photo Shop brushes, you can find these by doing a Google search, there are some very good free Photo Shop brushes to be found. These apply an Alpha layer that you lay over your designs. There are some great ones for rips and tears … for grunge & jeans available.
FINDING TEMPLATES IN WORLD:
A search of 'clothing templates' in world search or on X street will offer a wide range of different selections - and price range.
Some template artists offer complete designs in layers in photo shop format. In this form, when you purchase the template in world you receive a box which contains templates for use in world, but may also offer the option to download the full layers in a photo shop format to your hard drive. In this instance, the box will contain a note card providing a download page URL and password so that the templates are delivered directly to your hard drive.
: DO NOT GO THROUGH THE SL BROWSER
go to the url; via your pc, other template artists offer the template OUTLINE, that is, the shape of the article. Many new clothing designers find these very useful as the template generally fits the avatar body neatly while allowing the new designer to add their own layers, fabric and trims to make an original article of clothing.
For the beginning designer, I recommend joining two groups which often have templates offered as gifts or on MM Boards:
Lucky Chairs for Builders
Midnight Mania for Creators
These groups also at times have offers of sculpt maps for accessories such as shoes, scarves, cuffs, pants bottoms etc.
[9:54] Nyx Breen: wonderful information Raphaella excellent we are running long so I am going to ask if there are any questions for you :)
[9:55] Nyx Breen: wonderful job thank you
At this time Starship Jefferson was the next speaker
Hello and firstly I would like to thank Nyx for inviting me, and say what an honour it is to be here. My talk is called ‘Ten Things I Wish I’d Known about Textures and their Construction when I Started Making them Three Years Ago’. Not all the ten things are techniques; some are ways of looking at things. They all took me a while to work out on my own (sometimes a very long while lol). Hopefully then, listening to my waffle will save you time when you make your own textures. I’m not an expert by any means, and there are many textures in Second Life that make me go very green eyed with jealousy. I will be very happy to take peoples’ questions at the end, or please feel free to contact me afterwards if there is anything I can help you with. Apologies if any of this is underneath your levels of proficiency, or maybe goes over your heads – it’s hard to know exactly what texturing ability to pitch this talk to. If I use technical jargon that you don’t understand then ask me at the end, or Google it at a later date.
1. The end justifies the means
What is a texture? A texture is the means by which colour, detail, and surface texture are added to a prim, or an assortment of prims. So how is this achieved? By inconveniencing electrons in order to change pixel attributes. This might sound like the most unhelpful sentence, but it is worth considering textures in these terms for a moment. A texture, like any other digital image, is composed of a grid of tiny squares called pixels. Through the use of a graphics program we are able to change each pixel’s attributes (hue, saturation and brightness) according to our whim.
When I began making textures I was always looking for the ‘right’ technique, the ‘best’ graphics program, and the ‘correct’ way to make brickwork, or glass for example. But it doesn’t matter how a texture is made, because no one is ever going to know exactly what process or program you used. There are no rules. There are many different ways to achieve the same effect. No one process is better than any other; it all depends what suits you best at the time. If you prefer Gimp then don’t listen to all the Photoshop lovers telling you that your program is second rate. All that matters is the end result. The end justifies the means.
2. There are two types of texture
All of the textures in Second Life IMHO can be divided into two groups; materials and 3D textures. Materials covers the entire range of surface textures that we encounter in real life, such as wood or rabbit fur, and some that we don’t, like dragon skin or alien flesh.
There are three ways to create textures of materials:
1. Make them from scratch
This is most commonly done by applying filters to random shapes. The internet abounds with tutorials on this subject, though some of them may not seem relevant at first. For example, there are a lot of tutorials that tell you how to achieve text effects like slime or flame, and these can be adapted for your use.
2. Adapt photographs
It is very satisfying to make textures in this way. Avoid taking photographs of surfaces that are in direct sunlight as they will have shadows and highlights which you don’t want as they will be directional. Portions of photographs can also be used.
3. Generate them with an image rendering program
Examples include the splendid Wood Workshop, which is completely free, and Filter Forge, which you can get on a month’s free trial. Textures made in this fashion often look a bit dull, so open them up in a graphics program and have a little play with the brightness/contrast, the levels, and the colour balance. Basically these programs have a range of presets and will generate a texture for you according to a limited range of controls. Their one big advantage is the time that they can save you. The disadvantage is that you’re limited by the whim of the software company.
A key element of materials textures is seamlessness. A 512 x 512 of polished wood that isn’t seamless will have a very limited range of applications when compared to one that can be infinitely tiled without producing an unsightly edge. An important ability to have as a texture creator is to be able to convert a non-seamless image into a seamless one. This is traditionally achieved through the use of the clone brush tool, and there are many tutorials on the internet to show you how. I would recommend watching a video tutorial, because it is one of those things that sounds very daunting and is hard to explain in words, but in actuality is quite simple once you get the hang of it.
3D textures are more complex than materials textures, and typically contain arrangements of materials. 3D textures are popular because they save builders prims.
There are two main ways of making 3D textures – by using photographs and from scratch. Photographs of building facades, for example, can be cleaned up and adjusted to make 3D textures. But making textures like this then you are obviously limited to what buildings are available. You can cut and paste features from one image to the next, and produce 3D textures that are composites of different photographs. Blending options will have to be used to complete the illusion. There are some outstandingly beautiful textures in SL that are made like this.
3D textures that are made from scratch are basically arrangements of materials. For example, a door texture may be composed of two types of wood and some metal on the frame and the handle. This is the way that I make textures. I’ve always thought it is a bit like dressmaking. Basically I make shapes of uniform colours, change the uniform colours into materials, and then apply blending options. Shapes can be made using the shape tools, the pen tools or the polygonal lasso. It is very important that you use good materials, in the same way that a top chef requires the best of ingredients. Either cut the material using the shape as a template, or fill the shape with the material. By using the blending options then shapes can be turned into forms. Once all the elements of the texture are completed then I finish the texture by adding clouds and noise, and usually by sharpening it very slightly, either by using the sharpen filter, or better still with the high pass.
3. Experiment! Experiment! Experiment!
This is so obvious I nearly didn’t include it. I never experimented enough to begin with because I always thought that my time was better spent ‘learning skills’. Graphics programs invariably have a feature called the ‘history’ which enables you to change your mind and revert your image back to a previous state. This means you couldn’t spoil it if you wanted. Note though, that the history’s use is limited – let’s say you applied effect A and then effect B to a texture. You might then decide that you really like effect B, but regret applying A. You would have to use the history to revert the image to a state before you applied both A and B, and apply just B again. You cannot just cancel A and carry on.
4. You can never do enough tutorials
Tutorials are like recipes. Once you’ve followed a few then you develop the ability to skim through them while noting what general principles are being used, rather than having to make each and every type of apple pie. You can never do enough tutorials. They will teach you many tips and tricks. Do tutorials that have nothing to do with textures and you will learn processes that you can then use on your textures. There are good and bad tutorials, but you can learn something from every one of them. Many tutorials employ a very destructive type of editing, in which layers are worked on and then flattened into one other. This is because the tutorial writers are very confident in their own abilities and trust themselves not to keep changing their minds about things. It is often therefore helpful for mere mortals to make duplicates of layers and hide them so that you always have undamaged versions of all the picture elements. You don’t have to stick to everything the tutorial writer says – when they say to apply certain settings to a filter, for example, then have a little play around and see what other effects that filter can produce.
5. Light and shadow will always be problematic
Textures in Second Life are actually very simple when compared with textures in computer games. Second Life has very limited light and shade capabilities. Fiddle about with the ‘sun’ setting on your viewer and observe how SL changes how it displays textures according to the time of day. You will see that it is very arbitrary and limited. Apart from this, SL has no means by which textures change according to which light sources are nearby. This has been achieved in computer games since about 1998 by using a composite of textures, or ‘maps’.
This provides both difficulties and opportunity for the texture maker in SL. When you don’t know where the nearest light source will be then where do you put your highlights and shadows? For a while I went with the vast proportion of SL texture makers and used the graphics industry standard of 120 degrees, but the problem with this is that it has quite dramatic effects – it’s like the sun in the evening when shadows are longer than during the day, and it can look really cool but problems arise when, for example, you build a house, and use textures like these on the walls. Because they all have the same dramatic directional light effect on them then they will look very wrong if you place light sources near to them. If you put a roaring log fire in the middle of the room then things won’t look right because the walls will all look like they are responding to a different light source altogether.
These days I always stick to 90 degrees, but adjust the altitude (sometimes called elevation) of the light source to 30 degrees to give the piece some depth. Most light sources in RL come from above anyway, so it’s quite a safe bet.
6. Be organised on every level
I learnt this the hard way. And I still struggle with it. When working on a texture, it is worth spending the time naming and colour coding layers, and organising them into groups. If you are making a door then it is so much easier if all the bits of door knob are in a little group named ‘door knob’ and not spread throughout the mesh of layers that a complex texture will have. 50 layers all called ‘Layer 3 copy copy’ will slow you down eventually, I promise. You may think you can just auto-select whichever one you wish to alter with the cursor, but it’s not always as easy as that.
Spend time arranging your workspace. Most graphics programs will let you load and save them. An awful lot of time can be wasted moving and resizing windows if you’re not careful.
Keeping your folders organised is important too.
7. Learn the basics
It will not be possible to make good textures without knowing at least the basics of a graphics program. Thankfully, they are all very similar and work according to the same principles. Thankfully too, you all have the internet available and this abounds with help pages on every possible tool, filter and option that your graphics program has got so Google anything you don’t understand. Tutorials are an excellent way to learn stuff. Practise and experimentation (as ever) are the key.
8.It’s all in the blending modes and blending options
Most newbie texture makers head for the filters and jazzy effects without realising that by far the most powerful tools at their disposal are the very dull sounding blending modes and blending options. Blending modes are used to determine how two layers look when they are placed one above the other. The simplest blending mode is ‘normal’, which hides the lower layer where it is covered by the upper layer, just as if you were looking down on two objects in Real Life. But there are many other blending modes which can be used to great effect. ‘Multiply’, for example shows only the dark parts of the top layer, whereas ‘Screen’ shows only the light parts. Experimentation is essential. Next time you place one layer on top of another then change the blending mode and see what happens. If you have ever made a layer semi-transparent then you have already been blending.
The blending options (sometimes called ‘layer options’) are really like special effects that you can add to a layer to adjust the way that it looks. They are very useful because you can tweak them at any stage (unlike filters), and they do not damage the image that they are acting upon. [PLEASE SEE IMAGE]
Most newbie texture makers discover the bevel and the shadow functions first. The overuse of both is a common feature to be found in textures around SL. The more textures I make, the less I have actually found myself using these. Nowadays I use gradients a lot more than I did.
9. Clouds and Noise are your friends.
These filters are often overlooked because their functions are not obvious.
They are powerful tools for making otherwise flat and cartoony images look more real and 3D. [PLEASE SEE IMAGE]As you can see, just the simple addition of clouds and noise has really started to give form to the shape. Noise looks like static on a black and white TV screen in its rawest form, and clouds look like umm clouds. They are both almost exclusively used in black and white. They should be used very sparingly. Less is always more. The top two layers of my textures are always clouds and noise, in that order, set to ‘multiply’ blending mode at a very high transparency. Clouds are always seamless, so long as you stick to image sizes that are multiples of 64 pixels. Clouds and noise are your friends
10. Textures are an art form
Texture making, like any art form, does not exist in a vacuum. Related disciplines, such as the practise of ‘faux finishing’, or replicating materials such as marble and wood with paint, have been going on for millennia. Even though you may think that making textures is some 21st century thing, then you are actually working in the grandest art tradition of all – that of tricking the eye into accepting a 2D surface as a 3D one. Realising this makes you appreciate that you can draw inspiration from a huge range of art. Scenery design, and the practise of ‘trompe l’oeil’ are not really so very different to making textures. The sets of old TV sci-fi shows were like textures because they were hand painted to look like arrangements of materials – panels and screens, buttons and dashboards for example.
You can draw inspiration from everywhere. When I started I spent far too long looking at other peoples’ textures when it would have been more helpful to have gone for a very long walk with my eyes open. You will find that inspiration sometimes comes from unlikely sources. I hope that at least some of this has made (some) sense to you. I haven't provided any links, but nothing is beyond a simple Google search. Wood Workshop, for example, is at Woodworkshop.com. Filter Forge can be found at umm Filterforge.com I'm reluctant to provide links to tutorials - there's so many you really can't miss them. I can't think of any in particular that have helped me more than any other - and I am reluctant to name them too for the reason that I would be endorsing them as the 'right' or 'best' way. Gimp is free, as is a month's free trial of Photoshop. Photoshop is best, but Gimp can do everything that all but the most advanced texture maker will need IMHO.
Thanks very much for listening.
๔
๔Hello and firstly I would like to thank Nyx for inviting me, and say what an honour it is to be here. My talk is called ‘Ten Things I Wish I’d Known about Textures and their Construction when I Started Making them Three Years Ago’. Not all the ten things are techniques; some are ways of looking at things. They all took me a while to work out on my own (sometimes a very long while lol). Hopefully then, listening to my waffle will save you time when you make your own textures. I’m not an expert by any means, and there are many textures in Second Life that make me go very green eyed with jealousy. I will be very happy to take peoples’ questions at the end, or please feel free to contact me afterwards if there is anything I can help you with. Apologies if any of this is underneath your levels of proficiency, or maybe goes over your heads – it’s hard to know exactly what texturing ability to pitch this talk to. If I use technical jargon that you don’t understand then ask me at the end, or Google it at a later date.
1. The end justifies the means
What is a texture? A texture is the means by which colour, detail, and surface texture are added to a prim, or an assortment of prims. So how is this achieved? By inconveniencing electrons in order to change pixel attributes. This might sound like the most unhelpful sentence, but it is worth considering textures in these terms for a moment. A texture, like any other digital image, is composed of a grid of tiny squares called pixels. Through the use of a graphics program we are able to change each pixel’s attributes (hue, saturation and brightness) according to our whim.
When I began making textures I was always looking for the ‘right’ technique, the ‘best’ graphics program, and the ‘correct’ way to make brickwork, or glass for example. But it doesn’t matter how a texture is made, because no one is ever going to know exactly what process or program you used. There are no rules. There are many different ways to achieve the same effect. No one process is better than any other; it all depends what suits you best at the time. If you prefer Gimp then don’t listen to all the Photoshop lovers telling you that your program is second rate. All that matters is the end result. The end justifies the means.
2. There are two types of texture
All of the textures in Second Life IMHO can be divided into two groups; materials and 3D textures. Materials covers the entire range of surface textures that we encounter in real life, such as wood or rabbit fur, and some that we don’t, like dragon skin or alien flesh.
There are three ways to create textures of materials:
1. Make them from scratch
This is most commonly done by applying filters to random shapes. The internet abounds with tutorials on this subject, though some of them may not seem relevant at first. For example, there are a lot of tutorials that tell you how to achieve text effects like slime or flame, and these can be adapted for your use.
2. Adapt photographs
It is very satisfying to make textures in this way. Avoid taking photographs of surfaces that are in direct sunlight as they will have shadows and highlights which you don’t want as they will be directional. Portions of photographs can also be used.
3. Generate them with an image rendering program
Examples include the splendid Wood Workshop, which is completely free, and Filter Forge, which you can get on a month’s free trial. Textures made in this fashion often look a bit dull, so open them up in a graphics program and have a little play with the brightness/contrast, the levels, and the colour balance. Basically these programs have a range of presets and will generate a texture for you according to a limited range of controls. Their one big advantage is the time that they can save you. The disadvantage is that you’re limited by the whim of the software company.
A key element of materials textures is seamlessness. A 512 x 512 of polished wood that isn’t seamless will have a very limited range of applications when compared to one that can be infinitely tiled without producing an unsightly edge. An important ability to have as a texture creator is to be able to convert a non-seamless image into a seamless one. This is traditionally achieved through the use of the clone brush tool, and there are many tutorials on the internet to show you how. I would recommend watching a video tutorial, because it is one of those things that sounds very daunting and is hard to explain in words, but in actuality is quite simple once you get the hang of it.
3D textures are more complex than materials textures, and typically contain arrangements of materials. 3D textures are popular because they save builders prims.
There are two main ways of making 3D textures – by using photographs and from scratch. Photographs of building facades, for example, can be cleaned up and adjusted to make 3D textures. But making textures like this then you are obviously limited to what buildings are available. You can cut and paste features from one image to the next, and produce 3D textures that are composites of different photographs. Blending options will have to be used to complete the illusion. There are some outstandingly beautiful textures in SL that are made like this.
3D textures that are made from scratch are basically arrangements of materials. For example, a door texture may be composed of two types of wood and some metal on the frame and the handle. This is the way that I make textures. I’ve always thought it is a bit like dressmaking. Basically I make shapes of uniform colours, change the uniform colours into materials, and then apply blending options. Shapes can be made using the shape tools, the pen tools or the polygonal lasso. It is very important that you use good materials, in the same way that a top chef requires the best of ingredients. Either cut the material using the shape as a template, or fill the shape with the material. By using the blending options then shapes can be turned into forms. Once all the elements of the texture are completed then I finish the texture by adding clouds and noise, and usually by sharpening it very slightly, either by using the sharpen filter, or better still with the high pass.
3. Experiment! Experiment! Experiment!
This is so obvious I nearly didn’t include it. I never experimented enough to begin with because I always thought that my time was better spent ‘learning skills’. Graphics programs invariably have a feature called the ‘history’ which enables you to change your mind and revert your image back to a previous state. This means you couldn’t spoil it if you wanted. Note though, that the history’s use is limited – let’s say you applied effect A and then effect B to a texture. You might then decide that you really like effect B, but regret applying A. You would have to use the history to revert the image to a state before you applied both A and B, and apply just B again. You cannot just cancel A and carry on.
4. You can never do enough tutorials
Tutorials are like recipes. Once you’ve followed a few then you develop the ability to skim through them while noting what general principles are being used, rather than having to make each and every type of apple pie. You can never do enough tutorials. They will teach you many tips and tricks. Do tutorials that have nothing to do with textures and you will learn processes that you can then use on your textures. There are good and bad tutorials, but you can learn something from every one of them. Many tutorials employ a very destructive type of editing, in which layers are worked on and then flattened into one other. This is because the tutorial writers are very confident in their own abilities and trust themselves not to keep changing their minds about things. It is often therefore helpful for mere mortals to make duplicates of layers and hide them so that you always have undamaged versions of all the picture elements. You don’t have to stick to everything the tutorial writer says – when they say to apply certain settings to a filter, for example, then have a little play around and see what other effects that filter can produce.
5. Light and shadow will always be problematic
Textures in Second Life are actually very simple when compared with textures in computer games. Second Life has very limited light and shade capabilities. Fiddle about with the ‘sun’ setting on your viewer and observe how SL changes how it displays textures according to the time of day. You will see that it is very arbitrary and limited. Apart from this, SL has no means by which textures change according to which light sources are nearby. This has been achieved in computer games since about 1998 by using a composite of textures, or ‘maps’.
This provides both difficulties and opportunity for the texture maker in SL. When you don’t know where the nearest light source will be then where do you put your highlights and shadows? For a while I went with the vast proportion of SL texture makers and used the graphics industry standard of 120 degrees, but the problem with this is that it has quite dramatic effects – it’s like the sun in the evening when shadows are longer than during the day, and it can look really cool but problems arise when, for example, you build a house, and use textures like these on the walls. Because they all have the same dramatic directional light effect on them then they will look very wrong if you place light sources near to them. If you put a roaring log fire in the middle of the room then things won’t look right because the walls will all look like they are responding to a different light source altogether.
These days I always stick to 90 degrees, but adjust the altitude (sometimes called elevation) of the light source to 30 degrees to give the piece some depth. Most light sources in RL come from above anyway, so it’s quite a safe bet.
6. Be organised on every level
I learnt this the hard way. And I still struggle with it. When working on a texture, it is worth spending the time naming and colour coding layers, and organising them into groups. If you are making a door then it is so much easier if all the bits of door knob are in a little group named ‘door knob’ and not spread throughout the mesh of layers that a complex texture will have. 50 layers all called ‘Layer 3 copy copy’ will slow you down eventually, I promise. You may think you can just auto-select whichever one you wish to alter with the cursor, but it’s not always as easy as that.
Spend time arranging your workspace. Most graphics programs will let you load and save them. An awful lot of time can be wasted moving and resizing windows if you’re not careful.
Keeping your folders organised is important too.
7. Learn the basics
It will not be possible to make good textures without knowing at least the basics of a graphics program. Thankfully, they are all very similar and work according to the same principles. Thankfully too, you all have the internet available and this abounds with help pages on every possible tool, filter and option that your graphics program has got so Google anything you don’t understand. Tutorials are an excellent way to learn stuff. Practise and experimentation (as ever) are the key.
8.It’s all in the blending modes and blending options
Most newbie texture makers head for the filters and jazzy effects without realising that by far the most powerful tools at their disposal are the very dull sounding blending modes and blending options. Blending modes are used to determine how two layers look when they are placed one above the other. The simplest blending mode is ‘normal’, which hides the lower layer where it is covered by the upper layer, just as if you were looking down on two objects in Real Life. But there are many other blending modes which can be used to great effect. ‘Multiply’, for example shows only the dark parts of the top layer, whereas ‘Screen’ shows only the light parts. Experimentation is essential. Next time you place one layer on top of another then change the blending mode and see what happens. If you have ever made a layer semi-transparent then you have already been blending.
The blending options (sometimes called ‘layer options’) are really like special effects that you can add to a layer to adjust the way that it looks. They are very useful because you can tweak them at any stage (unlike filters), and they do not damage the image that they are acting upon. [PLEASE SEE IMAGE]
Most newbie texture makers discover the bevel and the shadow functions first. The overuse of both is a common feature to be found in textures around SL. The more textures I make, the less I have actually found myself using these. Nowadays I use gradients a lot more than I did.
9. Clouds and Noise are your friends.
These filters are often overlooked because their functions are not obvious.
They are powerful tools for making otherwise flat and cartoony images look more real and 3D. [PLEASE SEE IMAGE]As you can see, just the simple addition of clouds and noise has really started to give form to the shape. Noise looks like static on a black and white TV screen in its rawest form, and clouds look like umm clouds. They are both almost exclusively used in black and white. They should be used very sparingly. Less is always more. The top two layers of my textures are always clouds and noise, in that order, set to ‘multiply’ blending mode at a very high transparency. Clouds are always seamless, so long as you stick to image sizes that are multiples of 64 pixels. Clouds and noise are your friends
10. Textures are an art form
Texture making, like any art form, does not exist in a vacuum. Related disciplines, such as the practise of ‘faux finishing’, or replicating materials such as marble and wood with paint, have been going on for millennia. Even though you may think that making textures is some 21st century thing, then you are actually working in the grandest art tradition of all – that of tricking the eye into accepting a 2D surface as a 3D one. Realising this makes you appreciate that you can draw inspiration from a huge range of art. Scenery design, and the practise of ‘trompe l’oeil’ are not really so very different to making textures. The sets of old TV sci-fi shows were like textures because they were hand painted to look like arrangements of materials – panels and screens, buttons and dashboards for example.
You can draw inspiration from everywhere. When I started I spent far too long looking at other peoples’ textures when it would have been more helpful to have gone for a very long walk with my eyes open. You will find that inspiration sometimes comes from unlikely sources. I hope that at least some of this has made (some) sense to you. I haven't provided any links, but nothing is beyond a simple Google search. Wood Workshop, for example, is at Woodworkshop.com. Filter Forge can be found at umm Filterforge.com I'm reluctant to provide links to tutorials - there's so many you really can't miss them. I can't think of any in particular that have helped me more than any other - and I am reluctant to name them too for the reason that I would be endorsing them as the 'right' or 'best' way. Gimp is free, as is a month's free trial of Photoshop. Photoshop is best, but Gimp can do everything that all but the most advanced texture maker will need IMHO.
Thanks very much for listening.
Once again thank you all for coming and the artist for their collective time and expertise.
Good Building and Texturing
Nyx
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wow... good going Nyx
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