I need advice Please!!!!

I am working with textures. I can make some really nice ones but when I upload them and then put them on a prim they look bad and don't look like what they do when I make them. These are for a floors. I have uploaded sizes from 256x256 to 1024x1024 and they still don't look right. what do I need to do to make them look right? here you can find the 2 textures that I am working with now they are 1024x1024. http://www.muhlon.com/~paul_b/texture/ someone please help thanks.

Paneling is made from pieces of wood fitted together. The eye expects the grain to NOT match. I think it would help if you flip some of the panels horizontlly or cut and paste them so they are in a different order. Otherwise the grain looks quite nice.

For the white I think you need more gradient shading and highlighting so the grooves look recessed.

The eye is highly influenced by environment and SL tends to be high contrast and high saturation. Textures that would look real in other environments might look washed out here.

Finally, can you identify what you would like to be different about your examples? "Make it look right" is too vague.

What is it you feel looks different in SL than in PS about the two images in your link? The first one is just a white field with gray lines on it in PS. I see no reason why it would like anything other than a white field with gray lines on it in SL. The second one adds some pixelated gray wood grain patterning. Apply that to a surface in SL, and it's still gonna look like pixelated wood grain patterning and gray stripes on a white background. What do you expect to change?

I notice you've got the workd "plank" in the titles of both images, which suggests to me that your real question is how come your textures don't look like real wood planks in SL. The answer is because they don't look like real wood planks in Photoshop either. They look like line drawings, not like anything real.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, but you asked for advice, and I can't give it without first explaining what's wrong. Realism doesn't come from lines. It comes from a number of factors, not the least of which is shading. Your images have no shading at all. Just gray lines on a white background.

I'd say there are two main things to think about here. First, if you want the planks to look like planks instead of stripes, simply drawing borders between them isn't gonna do it. We need to see them cast shadows. We need to see highlights at the edges where they start to round over. We need to see light behave the way it would behave in a photo of real 3-dimensional planks. Right now, all that stuff is missing, so what you've got is not a texture, but a drawing.

Second, your wood grain is huge and is way too busy. The lines appear to dance and swirl around the canvas in a way that (no offense) is almost nauseating if you stare at it. It looks almost more like an accidental moire pattern than a deliberate wood grain.

Even if the grain were to look more like actual wood, you've got another problem with it. It's very obvious that one single pattern spans the whole canvas, and that you just drew lines across it to try to chop it up into planks. On a real wood planked floor, the grain of any one plank will never match the grain of any of its neighbors. Each individual plank would be cut from a different part of the tree, or from a different tree altogether. There's simply no way any single tree could have been wide enough to produce the pattern you've got. (Well, maybe a giant Sequoia would be, if it were a few thousand years old, but I don't think you'd be cutting one of those down to make your floor, would you?)

We could talk all day about how to produce more realistic wood in Photoshop, but I might recommend instead that you check out a free program from Spiral Graphics called Wood Workshop. With it, you can make pretty decent looking wood (even wood planks) in just a few clicks. I'd still suggest bringing the results into Photoshop for post processing afterwards, but Wood Workshop is a great place to start for stuff like this.

Well what the problem really is is when I put it on a sheet of wood to say in sl all the grain and all the lines you cant see. The one that is all white is what this lady was wanting an all white plain floor but to look like planks but when I put it on the wood so to speak the lines don't show up as lines they are real blurry that is what I was doing trying to figure out how to get it sharper looking as for looking real I know they don't these are my test ones just to see if I can get the lines clear in sl as soon as I can figure that out then I am going to do the lighting and shadowing and all that good stuff to make it real looking. and yep I did make it all one pattern that was just for speed to see how to get it to look but it is costing me every time I upload so I came here to help save some sl dolors lol. so any help on getting the lines clear and crisp I guess is what I am after. I am wanting the planks to look like a 1x6 rl plank on the floor. Thanks for the heads up the the program will give it a try but I do love my photoshop been using it for over 10 years now and I can for the most part get what I want out of it.

One of your problems could simply be what the sun is set to in world. Try forcing the sun to sunrise or sunset instead of noon. I have a white'ish marble floor in my store....if it's within an hour or so of noon in SL my floor looks neon white and you can't see the marbling at all, really a pain. I'm thinking of changing the flooring just because I can't imagine what my customers think when they come in and it's noon. It's quite scary actually.

Well I would point out a couple things. One is that even tho the plank lines are perfectly strait, the wood grain pattern is creating the illusion that they are wavy. The other thing that I would like to mention is that if you are going for realism then you should think long and hard before including pure black or pure white into your textures. These are not common colors in real life and even in the best of scenarios they will lend a cartoonish feel to your work.

Take some snapshots in SL and post them here so we can see what you are talkng about.

Ok I will take some snap shots didn't think of that lol. But I have also come to find out it seems to do this with all my textures they just ain't clear in sl I am also making some tattoo's and when I put them on my model on my pc the one used to see how clothes look like they look great but then after I upload them they are fuzzy and unclear and just plain look bad is there a standard for size that makes them clear cause I see others with tattoo's and they look fine. I will post picks of them both ways on my model then on sl I hope some one can help with this it is driving me nuts lol.

OK here is the images of the Tattoos http://www.muhlon.com/~paul_b/sl/