How to make stained glass?

I am brand new to SL, and trying to figure out how to make "stained glass window" image textures.

Here's how I think it should go...

1) create an image with transparent background.
2) draw on an outline onto the background (aka "lead"
3) fill various sections of the design with transparent, textured colors (aka "stained glass"
4) save as a .tga file
5) upload to SL

My main problem is with step 3. How do I make sure that my colors are going to show up as transparent in SL? And how do I put different textures on different portions of an image (for example put wavy glass in one part and smooth glass in another part)?

Right now I have Paint Shop Pro 6, and I'm not getting much help from the "Help" menu, lol. I'm guessing these are probably simple things to do in Photoshop and newer versions of Paint Shop. Which program would you recommend for this application?

If you have any other tips on creating transparent images please tell me!

Thanks for your help,
Sarah Balderdash

Hi Sarah...actually you can make any texture transparent as a whole IN WORLD...and is what I do for "stained-glass" ... the texture itself has no transparency, but I set it with the transparency setting on the Texture tab in the edit window...this makes it "semi-see-through". This works well with water textures too.

(I admit this makes the "leaded" portion of your window transparent as well, so is the lazy work-around.)

I use Paintshop Pro 7 and when I want to find out how to do something I go to Google. Type in something like PSP stained glass tutorial. There are hundreds of tutorials out there and I usually find one or two that will be what I am looking for. There are also filters you can download to make things easier. Many of these filters are free. I have learned how to make several textures using these tutorials.

Like Wisper said, you can simply set the prim your texture is on to have a certain degree of tranparency.

However, that effects the entire texture. If you really want to get fancy, you won't want the lead between the glass to be transparent. In that case, you'll need to work with the alpha channel to give each area of your texture the degree of transparency you want. If you haven't worked with the alpha channel in PSP, then do a search here on 'alpha channel'.

I use photoshop, so I can 't help with PSP, but I do know that in your alpha channel, you'll want the non transparent areas (lead, etc.) to be white and the semi-transparent areas (the colored glass), to be some shade of gray, depending on how transparent you want it. I'd start with something like 10-20% gray, since you really just want a small see-thru effect with stained glass. Any areas you want to be totally transparent would be black, but you probably don't need black in this instance.

Cheers!

If you can afford the prims and you wish to be able to vary the transparency of your stained glass in world without losing the solid lead you could use two prims. one prim has the stained glass and the second has the lead (with some alpha channel masking to make the areas where the glass will show through transparent). You'd arrange your prims with the stained glass slightly thinner than the leadwork prim so the lead is on top of the stained glass when viewed from either side.

Then again, using two prims to do this seems over the top but I thought I'd post this just for completeness.

The two prim method would certainly give a slightly more three dimensional look to the window, but may also bring out the alpha texture bug that happens when two alpha textures are seen together. Chosen Few would probably be able to address that in more detail.

Here's an example alpha channel layer for a stained glass framework. The white area corresponds to the leading, which would thus show as solid on the prim. The gray areas correspond to the glass sections which would be semi-transparent. Thus, one texture and one prim can show the solid leading and the semi-transparent glass by simply adjusting the alpha channel on that one texture. And we avoid the dual alpha texture bug that way. (what is the name for that bug?! )

Of course, the most intricate way to do the window would be to use solid prims for the leading! But that is obviously very prim heavy!

I don't know PSP, but isn't using an alpha channel overkill for this? In Photoshop I'd just start with a background and on another layer, draw up the "lead" in dark grey (and maybe apply a filter to give it some specular highlighting so it looks more 3D), change to the paintbucket/fill tool and set the opacity down to 50% or whatever looks good and then fill in the spaces between the lead lines with the right colors. To create wavy, bubbled, textured, etc. glass, there's two things I'd mess with. The first, I'm more sure of: Create another layer -- moved behind the foreground and using a textured brush tool turned to maybe 20% opacity, run waves of trans-black behind the colors you want to alter (or use pencil points for bubbles, etc.). You can also get similar textural bleed-throughs using the mode drop-down on either the layers pallette or the tools themselves. But you'd have to play with it to get just the right effect.

Hello, and welcome, Sarah!

Making stained glass, like anything else, depends on where you are going to use it, and how closely it's likely to be examined. Not just for SL, but for all 3D work, doing more work than you need to do not only wastes your time, but wastes computer cycles for rendering.

A texture with an Alpha channel is quite a bit larger than one without, and takes more time to "rez" in world.

So whether or not you choose to use that Alpha depends in large part how "important" the stained glass is going to be in your build. If it's just incidental windows, and is not likely to be examined closely, then it's probably best to just draw your stained glass, upload it as a 24 bit .tga file, and give it some measure of transparency in world. This has the added advantage of being able to "tweak" the transparency after upload, which will save you $L.

On the other hand, if the window is going to be a focal point, and you decide to have the leading solid and the "lights" (panes of glass) as various levels of transparency, then you will want to make an alpha channel, with various levels of gray, as Blaze has described.

I'm on a Mac, so I can't give you PSP instructions; but this is (briefly) how I make stained glass, using Adobe products.

First I sketch the design, scan it into the computer, and use Adobe Illustrator to make the leading. (The vector tools are just better in Illo, and they are the best way to get smooth curves and straight lines.)

I Place the vector drawing in Photoshop, give it a bevel, and use the Magic Wand tool to select the transparent panes of glass. Enlarge the Selection a few pixels, to overcome the anti-aliasing, move to a new transparent layer below the leading, and fill it with the glass color. Since I use PS, I also use a clipping plane to fill the areas with glass texture; but I have no idea how you'd do this with PSP.

When the window is done, if I'm not going to use an Alpha channel, I just upload as a 24 bit .tga file. If I do decide to use an alpha channel, I use Layer Selection to select the contents of each layer and Fill them in the Alpha channel, using the Levels tools while they are still selected to tweak the amount of gray in each. When all the glass has been transferred to the Alpha, I select the Leading, and fill that with White, to make it completely opaque. This lets me vary the levels, and therefore the transparency, to get the different degrees of transparency you find in real stained glass.

Then I Flatten, Shrink, Sharpen and Save as a Copy using 32 bit .tga. (Always flatten a copy, never the original. You never know when you'll need the original Layred file again.)

As an example, here is the Alpha channel from the Pegasus window you can find in my Texture Tutorials.

.

Here is the amount of transparency that alpha gives the window.



If you want to go and take a look at the real window, in world, you'll find it at Benten (17, 105), inside the Sky Dome.

Once again, this is only to be used in windows that are focal points. For other windows, don't use the alpha, just change the transparency using the Texture controls in SL.

Hope this helps!

Thanks to everyone who responded here. I am now armed with Adobe Photoshop and Robin (Sojourner) Wood's excellent texture tutorial.

I will be sure to post when I have some stained glass to show off.

~Sarah Balderdash