Some Texture Questions, and one other.

Hello All,

I started playing SL yesterday, and I'm HOOKED already.

I did a little 3d modelling (working on a furry wolf head) and I have some questions on Textures.

Are there any good tutorials on texture building in general? Doesn't have to be related to SL, but if it was, even better.

I made and uploaded a 'fur' texture that worked okay, but didn't look quite like I expected. Are there any tricks to getting Textures to line up right?

And finally, I have an account question. How much money to do receive with a basic account vs. a Premium account. And if I upgraded to a premium account, would I get a certain amount instantly?

thanks if you can help!

Welcome to SL!
I don't know if there are any tutorials especifically for texture building, but there is a really good one for making clothing textures and building here and some more tutorials in the SL site too. It also helps to take classes inworld. These are a great way to learn and to add to what one knows already.

To line up the textures, you should make them seamless, that way when you stretch or multiply them, they look good. And practice to see how textures look on different prims.

The main difference between a basic account and a premium is the stipend bonus. Basic memberships get 50L the weeks that the person logs in, while premium accounts get 500L per week. Hope that helps to clarify any doubts!

Thanks a ton Kats.

There is a great summary page that describes what the different accounts get when you sign up. But after you're a member, it's hard to find that information again! 50L per week (if you log in) for Basic, and 500L a week for premium... Got it.

I just signed up to be a premium member today.

Thanks for the tutorials. I'll check them out now.

You welcome!
Also, regarding to stipends, the basic accounts get the 50L plus some bonus L for ratings and the premiums get the 500L plus the extra bonus as well.

Ok, I wasn't sure what ratings were for. Thanks.

Premium also get, essentially, a free land tier or something I think.

Anyway, for learning to build textures, there are plenty of tutorials all over the web that you can search for in terms of general texture making.

For importing textures into the game though... that's a different thing. And you're doing rather complex mapping right off the bat.

Anyway, I assume you have the body templates. In that file, you'll notice both a Overlay and a UV layer. Both represent how the polys line up. So when you texture, wherever any parts meet, those same lines will meet too. The vertical lines work the same way; they're more or less the up and down parts of the body. Bare in mind that the lines and textures get slightly warped in-game due to the fact that they are wrapped around a 3d model based upon a 2d thing. You will have to make minor tweaks here and there, especially with complex textures, in order to line everything up properly.

For non-people textures (where you can't preview), it's a little harder since you really can't line things up. It's kinda of an art form. But things you can do or would want to keep in mind are:

Texture in scale (more or less). Don't make your body texture 256x256 and then your nose texture 512x128. You'll probably end up throwing yourself off in a lot of ways or have to tweak things a lot. Not to mention, if you're trying to get certain proportions, it's easier and faster to have it already in scale to each other rather than having to translate it.

Anticipate how close someone ever get to a texture... and then make it that small and no bigger (and don't include extra detail what won't be seen). What do I mean? Well... say I have a texture of a door way. This is a 'flavour' doorway that's stuck in the back of my house behind a glass wall. Essentially, a fake door. The closest anyone can get to it is standing at that glass wall at which point, the door fills up a quarter of my screen. The size you want your door texture to be is 1/4 of your screen. Since people won't be any closer to see it, it doesn't need to be any bigger or detailed. Saves you time on texturing details no one will ever see.

Anticipate what you're going to use the texture for and break it up. A very complex texture (Say, the entire outside of an Apache helicopter) is very hard to use: it'll be hard to line up, and tweaking everything to fit is a great hasstle. Not to mention, you would probably never be able to re-use the texture without uploading a new part. Break that texture up in to simplified ones: the cockpit, the glass, the blades, etc. That way, you can make minor tweaks more easily, both to texture and model.

Reuse. That old Apache rotor texture might work great as something else, as is or with a little tweaking. Saves you time and also saves you from uploading something new.

Visualize the basic form of whatever you're applying the texture to (cube, cylinder, sphere), and use that as a general guideline on how the texture will get applied and should be made.

Thanks for the great tips, Karighan!

You're welcome. It's kind of hard, for me anyway, to give general tips since there are different things you can do depending on what you're texturing. Specific questions make it a little easier to give you more meat to my answers.

Going back to the texture size for a sec, here's some tips from LSL Wiki. Though these won't neccesarily make for 'better' textures, they will make the textures load/render faster for clients which is always a good thing.