Textures question

It's obvious that without quality textures our creations aren't worthwhile.
...So what's the best approach to textures? Should we create our own or modify the existing ones??

That depends upon what your resources are, and what you intend to do with the textures. If you plan on building with the textures and nothing more, then I suggest googling for free texture resources that offer textures for personal/non commercial use. If you plan to sell textures to other SL residents, then it only makes sense to make your own textures from scratch, or photosource your own with a digital camera. If you sell textures you find on the web for more than $L10 (essentially providing an upload service) then people will not be too happy with you, and your reputation will suffer.

Try looking here for threads that point to texture resources and free texture generating applications like this:

Wood textures

I always make my own. Not only would it just not feel right not to make my own stuff, it's simply impossible to find existing textures that will work for everything I do. From the sound of it you're a builder, so I assume your experience will be similar. I highly recommend Photoshop if you can afford it. GIMP is free, and is almost as good if you'd rather not spend any money. If you're artistic, you'll find texturing to be pretty elementary once you learn the software.

The first 2 exercises on this page are pretty good to get you started with the basics of Photoshop.

Thanks Namssor and Chose for your opinions and the links

What about this kind of freeware? (to me it sounds good but I read that 3-d textures are too large and produce lag?)

or this

I have used neither, but go for it! What do you have to lose? BTW, there is no such thing as a 3D texture once you import it into SL or PS, so whatever the result, it will be 2D.

I'm not familiar with either of those programs, but they look kind of cheesy. I read through the entire Paurex site, and nowhere does it even mention what file formats the thing uses or any other tehcnincal information beyond basic system requirements, and the GenTex thing has no information at all. If they can't prodice TGA files with alpha channels, then their usefulness for SL will be extremely limited, and I'm always leary of strange downloads, regardless.

There's absolutely nothing in the example pics for either program that you couldn't do in about 10 seconds in Photoshop or GIMP, so why even bother with them? As I said earlier, Photoshop is worth every penny if you've got the money, and if you don't then GIMP is totally free, and almost as good.

As for what you may have read saying that 3D textures are "too big and produce lag," I'm not sure what you mean, but I'll take a stab at clarifying a few things for you.

First of all, all textures in SL are 2D, not 3D. The objects the textures are applied to are 3-dimensional, sure, but the textures themselves are flat, 2-dimensional planes. Think of it kind of like gift wrapping a package. The wrapping paper is your 2D texture, and the box is your 3D object. Even though the paper wraps around the box in 3D space, the pattern on the paper is still just 2D picture.

3D textures are available in high end 3D modeling packages, but not in SL. For example in Maya, you can "paint" with meat or hair or trees or water or what have you, but none of that has anything to do with the kind of texturing that happens in SL. Every image in SL is strictly 2-dimensional.

Perhaps what you were thinking by "too big and produce lag," was the fact that using too many big textures will produce lag. For example, one of the reasons malls lag so much in SL is because too many people use too many big textures where they shouldn't. For example, a 1024x1024 pixel texture takes 16 times as much time to load and 16 times as much memory and processing power as a 256x256. Multiply that by several hundred textures in a mall, and you'll understand why your 128 or 256MB video card chokes. The average mall has gigabytes or in some cases terrabytes worth of textures in it, and your video card can only handle a couple hundred megabytes at best. The bottom line here is keep those textures small. 256x256 is usually plenty big enough. SL really excells at drawing small textures at full screen size.