Gah.. please help me with metal and gem textures

Hi,

here's the deal. I absolutely don't want to buy my textures, I want to do them myself. I'm fidgeting with jewellery and I heavily dislike the textures I have. I've also spent three (yes, that's true, 3) weeks reading through every single version of metal tutorial for Photoshop and nothing is even near what I want to achieve. I won't even get into gem textures.. no tutorials found there.

Anyway, could someone please help me out here. I know there are lots of talented jewelers out there who have gorgeous textures, how?! With all my patience, I'm getting desperate.
So. Please help. Anyone.

I've got a few i'm happy to share with you. Could be the same ones though. Drop me an IM and i'll send them your way

here is one I googled for metal http://www.kirupa.com/motiongraphics/metal_texture.htm
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Hmm well thanks both of you but that isn't quite it.
I have all the possible and impossible freebie textures which I don't use anymore. I have my own too but those look even worse than freebies
I want to make new and really good ones.
Thing with silver is that it's supposed to be like real life silver only better. So it doesn't come off looking bland and just white. I dont know, I guess I'll go play some more with gradials.
Gems are still the hugest puzzle on the block. I don't really want gems like ruby and such. More like semiprecious ones. Like moonstone etc.

Shir

If you are using PS CS2 or CS3 then IM me in world, I would be happy to give you a few tips.

Did you see this thread about making silver and gold? /109/33/104894/1.html

I'm a little concerned regarding your comment that your silver gradients look "bland and white" to you. There are two possible explanations for that. Either you're making them wrong or your hardware isn't good enough to show you how your work really looks. If you've really been through as many tutorials as you say, I'd suspect your problem is the latter. Dozens of tutorials can't all be wrong, after all.

How's the contrast ratio on your monitor? How old is it? What are its specs? What video card are you using? Do you have all the latest drivers? Current version of Direct-X? All of these things can make a huge difference to what you think you're looking at.

I recently upgraded my monitors from a 4 yr. old pair of 19" Samsungs to a new pair of 24" Eizos. The Samsungs were only 700:1 contrast with a brightness of 250 cd/m2. The Eizos are 3000:1, 450 cd/m2. I simply can't believe how much detail I was missing before. I'd suspect the same thing may be going on with you, only by the sound of it, probably worse.


EDIT: There's also a third possibility. Perhaps your expectations for what can be done with texturing are unrealistic. What do you mean by "like real silver but better"? You do realize that completely realistic silver is not something that can be painted, right? You can come close with a good material shader, but SL doesn't use material shaders at this time. For all SL's amazingness as a cutting edge communications platform, it's been stuck in like 2002, graphics wise, since its inception. You can make a lot of good-looking things with this old-school texturing system, but don't expect to Pixar movies or next-gen game quality imagery with it.

It tricky part but if you look for images in google you can find different ideas. I just found this really cool site with different techniques there is even one for making diamond effect.
Lot of it is figure out how to make shiny and transluent effects.
I am just starting out too so it takes bit of steps. Let me give you this link so you can scroll through look at different possiblities.
If you can figure out some of basics of shiny, transculent or glimmering orbs you can also figure out how to do gems.
Making shiny metal can be hard there is different ways to do it.
One is actually drawing it using different color tones. I found guide on wetcanvas.com but lost the link but below is lot of other cool ideas too
This one has diamond, different, metal shiny, um also there also different metal effects too but you have too look thrugh it all there so many its too numerous to list all of each one.
http://www.webdesign.org/web/photoshop/tutorials
/
Sometimes white looks one way when you use it but looks entirely different on prim it creates sort of interesting effect. Or at least this has happen to me I have only 2533mhz 756 ram and nvidia 6300 series video card.
That is part of the gradient.
Good luck Remember Google images and type how to make metal texture or gems too that works.

Oh my goodness, you are so right about my monitor. Cheesebrain over here forgot that I have an old CRT which refuses to calibrate properly recently and I suppose it's dying on me. But since I'm used to it's weird display, I completely forgot about that.
However I will use every last bit I got here and see if I can make something happen. Thanks guys. And girls (if any).

I'm not terribly sure you would want to do this, but a search on Google or your favorite brand of search engine will give you a plethora of pictures of gorgeously cut stones. Some in a ring and others bare on a white background, just save the ones you want and edit out the white background and there you go a texture for a gem that makes everybody drool.

Alternately I have some full permission gemstone textures I wouildn't mind sharing, just pop me a message in SL and I will find them in my inventory evetually and send them to you.

Have you considered some plug-ins for Photoshop? There are several companies that make plug-ins which can retexture. I know that Alien Skin makes several packages, and I use Eye Candy for my chrome, copper, silver, gold, and platinums.

You said you really want to make these yourself, I realize, but if you do decide to purchase gemstone textures I'd recommend LFox (Lauren Fox). She has some good jewelry metals, and many collections of absolutely beautiful gem and precious stone textures. You can see them on SLExchange or in-world at one of her stores.

This is a wonderful resource for textures--keep in mind, these textures are raw, and are non-repeatable.

http://www.mayang.com/textures/