Wool Texture on adobe

Hey
Anyone that has the power post your god like genius here how its done please
cheers

http://mayang.com/textures/ has some wool textures and they are all free to use for any purpose.

Yup. Mayang.


www.mayang.com/textures

Have fun with these. Be warned that all the textures are in the raw--so, on the bright side they are super high resolution, and on the bad side they aren't repeatable (tileable).

Hope you know how to tile. If you don't, there are tutorials on Google for that. If you don't want to make a texture tileable--I can do it for you at very reasonable price.

Good luck.

On Adobe what? I assume you mean Photoshop, but Adobe currently makes about 75 other programs.

Assuming you do indeed mean Photoshop, if you want to make your own wool texture(s) rather than editing pre-existing ones, there are several options. One would be to use this set of brushes from David Nagel: http://macdesignpro.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=33276 . It contains 3 brushes specifically for wool-like effects. Nagel's brush collections are fantastic.

Another option would be to photograph or scan a piece of wool from real life and then enhance it Photshop to make a texture out of it.

A third way to go (which is what I'd do) would be to follow this quick 2-minute tutorial:


1. Create a New Image

You'll want to start with a fairly large size, either 512x512 or 1024x1024 in order to have enough pixels to work with for a decent level of detail. You probably won't want to upload it to SL at that size though, so we'll talk about what to upload at the end.

2. Render Some Clouds

On the Toolbox, set your foreground color to a dark gray and your background color to a light gray. Then go Filter -> Render -> Clouds.

2. Add Noise

Go Filter -> Noise -> Add Noise. Set the amount to somwhere between 12 and 14% or so. Set the distribution to Gaussian and make sure the boc for Monochromatic is checked.

3. Give It Glowing Edges

Go Filter -> Stylize -> Glowing Edges. Set the edge width to 2. Set the Edge Brightness to somewhere around 8-10. Set the Smoothness somewhere around 5-7. The exact settings are up to you. Explore the options to see the various effects.

You should now have a curly fibrous looking grayscale texture, which could pass well for either for wool or berber carpet. So consider this a free bonus; you get two textures in one. It will look equally good for either purpose, depending on how you color it and in what context you put it. (i.e. color it brown and put it on a sweater and it's wool; color it blue and put it on the floor and it's carpet)

4. Colorize

In the Layers Palette locate the button at the bottom center that looks like a half black, half white, circle. It will say "Create new fill or adjustment layer" when you hover your mouse over it. Click it, and in the menu that pops up, choose Hue/Saturation. This will create a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer immediately above your base wool/carpet layer, and the Hue/Saturation dialog will pop up. In the dialog, turn on the Colorize and Preview checkboxes, and then play with the sliders until you get the color you want.

Adjustment layers are cool because they allow you to make all sorts of alterations to your image, completely non-destructively. They project effects onto the layers beneath them, but they don't make any real changes to them. You can undo or change the effects at any time simply by removing or altering the adjustment layer.

5. Make the Image Suitable For SL

The last things to do before calling the image complete are to make it a good size for SL and to make it tile.

Appropriate sizing is a judgment call. To choose what size is best, read the info on image sizes at the top of the forum, and consider carefully what you think will be the best balance between performance and detail level for the specific application of this texture. In most cases, 256x256 is ideal.

Once you've chosen a size, either resize the whole image to it by going Image -> Image Size, or else crop the image to that size using the Crop tool. Note that cropping will remove parts of the image while keeping everything the size it is now. Resizing will keep everything but will shrink your details. Which way is best is up to you.

To make the image tile, there are several options. Here is the simplest. Duplicate your wool layer (not the adjustment layer) and then offset the layer by going Filter -> Other Offset. Set the horizontal and vertical offset amount to half the size of the canvas (if you're at 256x256, offset by 128, 12. This will bring the edges to the middle, showing you a cross-shaped seam where the edges meet. To eliminate the seam, grab the Eraser tool, give it a very soft brush setting, and erase the seams to expose the un-offset wool below.

After the seams are gone, flatten the two wool layers (but not the adjustment layer) and offset again to verify that the texture is seamless. If you see any seams, it means you weren't as careful as you should have been in the last paragraph. No problem though, just repeat the process again by making another copy, offsetting it, and erasing the seams.

Save and Upload
Save your layered work as a PSD so you have it preserved, and then save a copy as 24-bit TGA. Upload the TGA to SL.


There you go, pretty decent looking wool (or carpet) from scratch in 2 minutes or less.

Chosen, yet again you rock my socks off.

Only thing...I wouldn't drop your texture to 256X256...that's tiny, and will look blurry when placed on something larger. The only way this will look clear is if you plan to make the 'repeating face' value relatively high. For reference, repeating texture or not, I upload my textures NO less than 600 pixels on it's smallest side (ie. 800X600). Sometimes I'm nearing the 2000 pixel range....



As long as each dimension is divisible by two...you are golden.

Aw, thanks.


The problem here is twofold. First, textures need to be not just divisible by two, but measured in POWERS OF TWO. Otherwise, SL is just going to resize them on you at the time of upload, and it won't do it nearly as well as Photoshop would. Your 800x600 will be downsized to 512x512, and your 2000x20000 will shrink to 1024x1024 (as will any other size over 1024, since 1024 is the max SL can use). Were you to pre-size them in Photoshop yourself, rather than letting SL do it for you, you'd find the results would look much better.

The power of two requirement is standard for most OpenGL applications, by the way.

Second, I emphatically disagree that 256x256 is "tiny". It's perhaps the most common size for game textures (or at least was back when most games were using the kind of graphics that SL still uses), and it's usually the best happy medium between detail level and performance concerns for SL.

Consider that every time you use a 1024x1024, you're eating 3 or 4 MB worth of video memory (3MB if it's 24-bit, 4MB if it's 32-bit), and every 512x512 consumes either 768K or 1MB. It doesn't take all that many of textures of that size in a scene to overwhelm a 128 or 256MB video card, which is what most people have. A 256x256, on the other hand is just 192K or 256K, meaning it takes hundreds of them to make a dent in video performance.

While SL certainly has its share of faults and shortcomings, one area where it is almost unsurpassed by any other program on this Earth is in its ability to display small textures at full screen size with amazing clarity. To demonstrate this, here's an experiment I usually suggest people try. Put a well-made 256x256 sized texture on a cube and zoom in on it so it fills the screen. If your SL window is 1024 pixels wide, you're now looking at that texture at roughly 16 times its actual size, and it still looks great. This is one area where SL truly shines.

With that in mind, there's rarely any need to go bigger than 256x256, especially for something as easily repeatable as wool.

The biggest reason SL runs as slowly as it does is because too many people use textures that are way bigger than they should be. An example of this that I often cite is something Andrew Linden once mentioned to me. He pointed out that the average mall in SL has several hundred megabytes worth of textures on display all at once, many even in the gigabytes, and that that's why malls consistently lag so much. If every merchant in every mall were to keep their textures at 256x256 or smaller, that wouldn't be the case.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that 256 is ideal for ALL textures, just that it's what's best for most. I usually suggest as a rule of thumb that people keep around 80% of their textures at 256x256 or smaler, about 15% at 512x512, and about 5% at 1024x1024. Use the bigger sizes when you need a lot of small details, like, say, fine text that would otherwise become illegible. For everything else, keep textures as small as possible. It's far better to repeat a small texture 10 times than to use one that's 10 times the size with all those repeats painted right into it.

Anyone who would like an example of just how much better things run at 256x256 should stop by the Jewelry Exposition going on right now. When I went, the sim was full, but there was almost no lag and textures were loading right away. I was trying to figure out how in the world this was possible until I talked to one of the vendors there. Apparently, the organizer limited texture size on the sim to no larger than 256x256.

Well then...I better get busy optimizing my studio then...lol.