texture perms ..This is confusing..

Hello,

For the past 8 months I've been gathering tons of images I like for the day I would know how to use photoshop and create better textures for myself than by just cropping.

Few days ago, I finally did open PS and in 2 hours created myself nice adverts for the furniture I sell inworld. Much enjoying the experience, of course I found back my heavy images and pics folder to play with them..and I am having a total blast creating textures..which I -may- sell.

Now, about the privs.. chatting with a friend I just realised something which I find very confusing. How many times do we see full perms textures sold.. with the post ending with frustrated comments about the textures being sold to apply on objects but no to resell as is.

That caused me to always believe that the textures -needed- to be trans for people to be able to sell the objects or clothes they create using the textures, that if the textures are copy/no trans, they will not be able to transfer the actual creation itself.

Well, few min ago I was told the opposite, and I did a test.. and the person was right: Even if the texture is no trans, the created object -can- be transfered.

So..

Why in the world do people sell their textures with the trans perm? lol
This doesn't make sense to me at all..
If objects can be transfered anyway, why not just set it no trans and not worries about people reselling the textures alone ?

I am very perplex about this. Am I misunderstanding something or do just people stives to be frustrated and stressed about what becomes to the textures they sell ?


There is something else I would like to know, mostly from clothes creators:

Does the texture -need- to be mod for you to create clothes with it ? and are certain texture size better than others ?

Hi,
Textures for sale to be used on objects which people will make for sale *are* usually full permissions.

I believe there is some glitch or bug just now where no-transfer textures can still allow an object to be transferred, but I don't imagine this will be allowed to persist.

I for one wouldn't buy no-trans textures even if it works right now in case it gets 'fixed' later and my stuff lost its texture or something.

Textures in-world would need to be Full Perms to be any use to clothes creators (if I understand the clothes creation process correctly) as they'd need to use them in RL with the clothes templates in a graphics program such as PhotoShop, and you can only upload full-perms textures to RL. Also, I think if textures are no-mod you can't apply them to anything you're building (like a prim attachment). I'd always assumed most clothes creators would make their own textures rather than buying them in-world.

HTH.

No modify textures in no way cause an object you have built to become non modifiable either at the point of adding the texture to the prim or selling on to others.

I hear many people say this now and it's simply not the case. I've tested and tested this, as have others, and used no mod textures quite often in my builds (that I then sell as modifiable), many of which have been purchased from one of the longest running texture businesses in SL.

The only thing a no modify tag prevents is downloading the texture to your harddrive and obtaining the UUID of that texture.

It is quite acceptable to mark your textures as copy/transfer/no modify. What this does is allow you to name that texture with your own information, including description, which cannot then be changed (might not stop resale but makes it obvious to those who care where it came from originally)

As for the transfer issue, I'd take the poster's advice above and not rely on it staying that way.

I do have a question for you though. When you tested it, was the no transfer texture full permissions for you, and you removed the transfer tag? If this is the case, you would certainly be able to transfer the item with no trouble. It is only after you transfer an item that the next owner permissions come into play. At that point, the item would then become non transferrable and that person would not be able to transfer it back to you.

~B

The bug that allowes a no-trans texture to be applied to an item and not be restricted to being no-trans is just that - a bug - unsupported by LL and not something we can count on to persist.

Applying a no-transfer texture to a prim causes it to SHOUT "Unable to add item!", every single time it is applied. No respectable content creator will buy or use textures that make it look like they are doing something inappropriate in their building, nor will they want to annoy everyone withing shout range every time they apply a limited texture.

If a texture is no-mod, it can't be downloaded and modified for use in making clothing textures or for adjusting a texture to suit a particular build. Again, a reputable, competent Builder will avoid purchasing such textures, and clothing creators won't buy them at all.

No copy? You can use it ONCE, on one prim, and it's gone.

So serious texture sellers have no choice. It's sell full-perms, or hamstring the usefulness and sellability of your work. The SL perms restrictions are worthless for protecting the rights of texture artists.

I consider myself both reputable and competent and have no issue with no modify textures Ceera. It is a very small percentage of builders in SL who would be concerned with what you are discussing since you build sims, the majority do not.

I'd also say that most of the better builders also make most of their own textures, I know I do unless it's more practical to buy, and the first place I go is Textures Unlimited......... are you saying the owner of Textures Unlimited is not a serious texture seller? Even though she must be one of the longest lasting texture sellers in SL to date?

We should always beware such broad sweeping judgments on the basis of our own experience, especially in your case, since large scale sim building is not exactly what the majority of builders do. Even the reputable, competent ones.

~B

I won't make any judgements one way or the other about Textures Unlimited. If they choose to sell textures that are no-mod or no transfer, that is their choice. But a lot of customers will refuse to buy such textures.

I sell the textures that I create at Textures-R-Us, which is the largest texture store in SL. I have over 1000 textures for sale there, all of which are my own original creations, and I make enough profits from those sales alone to cover 100% of my SL expenses for all my accounts, and still cash out profits above that every month. We have one new artist, out of the 40+ artists who sell their work at TRU, who is doing restricted perms textures. He is primarily an external texture creator who sells his textures on the Web, and he is just testing the waters in SL right now. As far as I know, the other 39+ artists at TRU considered this situation, and they all determined that it was very likely that their sales would decline if they restricted the perms on their textures, and that the possibility of their restricted textures becoming worthless (or at least worth far less) to customers if that 'bug' ever gets fixed was a risk they were unwilling to take.

I don't know any Builder who would want to use "no-transfer" textures that make their prims shout "Unable to add item!" every time they are used. To me, that is extremely unprofessional as well as being rude to everyone within shout range, and I certainly won't use them. It may be acceptable if all you are doing is making a three-prim deck to add on to your personal prefab, using a restricted texture kit from the prefab seller. But in most cases, it makes the texture far less likely to be sellable to anyone who would use it frequently.

I design and sell clothes, too. I know that a clothing designer can not make serious use of cloth textures that are in any way restricted. The only thing they could do with a restricted texture would be to slap it on a default clothing template or prim parts, and just let the texture fall where it will, like a noob experimenting with texturing clothes for the first time. That may be acceptable for applying a simple plaid texture to a prim skirt, but it won't work for making a pair of plaid pants that have seams that match and details like pockets, creases, and folds in the fabric. You can't make high-quality clothes unless you can edit the texture.

The OP asked why texture sellers don't restrict textures. I answered, speaking as one texture seller that is part of a large group of texture sellers, as well as speaking from the standpoint of a professional builder and clothing designer, why virtually none of us choose to do so. If others make other choices, that is up to them.

Ambrosia,
You have heard arguments for both sides. In the end the choice is yours; set the perms as you see fit.

Now, about buyiong textures for making clothes. I don't see how that makes much sense. If I buy a texture, I still have to do all the detail work, add seems, trim, edges, alpha, shading and highlighting ... so a texture has not saved me much time at all. Do clothes designers really buy that many textures? Just wondering if I need to re-think my build process ...

Probably with more sarcasm than is warranted, but: A "reputable, competent" builder is defined by downloading and re-uploading textures, taking the compression quality hit twice??

Well, I sell a lot of plaid fabric, striped fabric, pleated fabric textures, and leather textures - stuff that can certainly be used for making clothes. And I know some clothing designers have bought and even specificly commissioned my tartans and my pleated versions of plaids, specificly because they wanted a good, seamless copy of a specific clan tartan that would already be in a form suitable for use in SL texturing work...

Of course, those same textures can also be used or furniture, curtains, and the like. I can't say for sure what gets used where.

When I design clothes, I often start by creating a base fabric pattern, that I then manipulate in Photoshop to add folds and creases, pockets, and other details. If I wanted, for example, to make a plaid shirt in the Mackay tartan, why hand-draw that detailed plaid pattern, if someone else already has a nice, crisp, seamless version for sale? Since I make my own textures, I usually do the whole process myself. But not everyone knows how to make good looking fabrics.

Well, I consider myself a reputable and competent builder and I do this all the time. I buy most of my textures at TRU and frequently find myself needing to alter them to suit what I'm building. The day is coming where I'll make all my own textures from scratch but until that time I (and most other builders) will download and alter existing textures.

Depends on what you need to do. If you need to add a window to an existing brick wall, or shadows to go under the eaves? Or if you want to save prims by adding framed art or pinned-up posters already hanging on a wall texture? You can't do that any other way. For example, I textured a group of buildings for a client recently using primarily textures that were purchased from a fellow TRU artist. Her "Brick Villa" set already had 80% of the types of brick or plaster wall textures that my client's build called for, so why re-invent the wheel? But I needed four extra texture versions to get the windows and a few other details the way I wanted them. So for just those four, I copied the existing plain brick or plain plaster wall to my system, added the windows, and uploaded them back into SL. If you went to that build right now, I seriously doubt you can tell which surfaces had her original textures, and which were the ones I modfied.

The "compression quality hit" you are referring to is negligable on a decent resolution texture. Yes, it is there. But most people, honestly, won't see the difference unless the same texture is looped through downloading and re-uploading many, many times.

For what it's worth (not much, probably), I would never buy a texture that is no-mod (or not full perms, for that matter), they would be completely useless to me as a buider. I probably create half of the textures I use, and buy the other half. The vast majority of those that I do buy need modifying in some way - it maybe something as simply as making it tilable, or changing the hue/contrast, but more often than not to customise it for each prim's environment - lighting, shade, etc.

To turn my sarcasm around into something more constructive, do you also sell those textures in hi-res, non-compressed form, by, say, allowing people to order them to an email address? That would be optimal for further manipulation.
And yes, if your base textures are hi-res, and you download them, modify them and upload them at a reasonable "practical" SL resolution, compression loss would be minimal. I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that it *is* there, since a lot of people do not seem to realize that there even is such a thing as lossy formats, and constantly working in them degrades the quality.

If I have to modify a texture in such a way, I clean up any lost information before re-uploading. Most textures are not so complex as to make this a difficult task.

If someone asked for them that way, I'd consider it. Haven't yet had anyone ask for more than a 512 x 512 or 1024 x 1024 texture from one of my standard sets. In general, I base the resolution of my in-world textures on what is needed to get the desired look, without using more than is needed. For example, an alpha-mapped railing might only need to be 256 x 256, or even 128 x 128, because it doesn't have much detail. Whereas a fabric set intended for clothing makers might include the fabric at several resolutions, as high as 1024 x 1024.

I just had to add my two Lindens from a texture buyer's perspective.

Full perms is the only way I'll buy textures. No matter how pretty or nice, I just won't buy full perm textures.

In the early days I bought a no transfer texture and was appalled when it SHOUTED. Yikes. Also, if I apply textures from the texture menu itself while editing (rather than tossing the texture on a prim), no transfer textures don't shop up in the list.

I don't modify a lot of textures, but when I need to, it's nice to be able to download, tweak and reupload for use.

If I were to ever sell textures I've created (likely never, but you one never knows), I'd sell them full perms. I wouldn't allow a few scammers to spoil it for the builders. The people who rip off textures and sell them as their own -- yes, they hurt, they should be shot, but they will never go away. Opportunists lurk around every corner in RL and SL. Best to keep your real clients in mind and cater to them and do what you can to deal with the unscrupulous ones.

And besides, who knows when LL will fix certain bugs and the trouble it will cause!

Peace, purrs and headbonks,