need gold texture

After alot of faild atempts im looking for a gold texture for jewelry that looks realistic.
tryd faild tryd faild lol so now im calling for the help of a pro.

When the texure is aplyed to a ring i need it torealy look like a gold ring.
Im going for a nice clean 9ct gold texture.
I have no idea how to get this done so im asking here

Iv studyd silversmithing and some gold smithing in RL so i can make the items.

But making the "&^%&^^" texture is driving me nuts

I have a ton of textures I'll see what I have and send you my best ones I have... If ya had a magic wand you might be able to make your own

As usual, I won't give away any textures, but I will tell you how to make your own. It's unlikely any pre-existing textures will work for what you're trying to do anyway. I'll explain.

The easiest answer, of course is just to use a blank yellow texture with a shine on it, but in SL, you always have to account for people who don't have shine turned on, as well as for people who do. That means your texturing has to include "faux shine", and that in turn means taking a really good critical look at how light and shadow works on the material you're trying to replicate. As my favorite art teacher in colege used to say all the time, approach every image simply and problematically as a study of light and shadow, and you'll never go wrong.

The challenge you're facing, really, is that there's no such thing as "gold texture", at least not as far as smooth, polished, jewelry grade gold is concerned. Like all highly reflective surfaces, it has no real appearance of its own, but gets its appearance from its surroundings. We identify it visually as gold by the way it reflects its environment, not by its own inherent "texture". When we come across a shiny surface that reflects its surroundings in certain shades of yellow and brown, our brain says "hey, that's gold". It's the dynamincs of the reflections that make it work, and since SL has no reflections, gold in the strictest sense cannot exist.

That having been said, you can fake it to a certain degree. When armed with the knowledge that gold reflects in shades of brown and yellow, the obvious solution is to create surfaces that grade between those two colors.

Take a look at this pic of the Lord of the Rings ring, for example:



And this one:



And even this really crappy one:



Note that all three of these pictures look VERY different, and none of them look particularly like real gold (not even the middle one, which is a photograph), but we instantly somehow still regcognize them as gold every time. It's all in the dominant colors, how those colors grade together, and in how those gradients flow in accordance with the surface shape. Put those three factors together, and your eye will call it "gold".

So, let's take it one step at a time. Fist we'll talk color, then gradients, then shape.

I find that the colors D8BC3A (or 216,188,58 if you prefer RGB over Hex) and
FAF29F (250,242,159) work really well for simulating gold. The first is sort of butterscotch brown, and the second is a pasty yellow. Neither of the two colors individually looks particularly golden, but when the two grade together, it works. Again, gold has no real "color" of its own; it's all in the tints it gives to reflections, and those two colors are usually among the strongest of those tints under normal lighting conditions.

Now that you've got your colors, the next step is to grade them together properly. As beings constantly exposed to paintings, graphics, and other 2D representations of the 3D world, we're accustomed to seeing "shine" painted in a certain way. It's arguable whether it really looks like shine in a ctitical sense, but because we're so programmed to accept it as shine, we do. That pattern is generally a gradient with 4 color stops, or it can be thought of as 3 gradients in a row. First is a wide grade from dark to light, followed by a very narrow, abrupt grade back to dark, and then medium width grade back to light. Assuming you're using Photoshop, take a look at the chrome and copper preset gradients for some examples of this. When you see that pattern, your brain goes "ooh, shiny", even though it's not.

So, put all that together, and you get something like the lettering I did for these very simple signs:



To anyone who knows Photoshop, it's obvious that that texture was a 2-minute job, but it works. The text just has a gradient overlay with the colors and pattern I described, and then a quick bevel and emboss to give it some relief.

Now, to talk about flow. To make this practical for something like a ring, you'll need to take into account the shape of each surface that is to be "guilded", and then shape the gradients/reflections accordingly.

If your ring is a torus, like the Lord of the Rings ring, then the light to dark pattern will have to go in 2 directions, just as it does in those pictures I linked above. Notice in all 3 images, there's a repetition of that wide-narrow-medium grading that I mentioned earlier going all the way around the major circumference, while at the same time, there's a similar, but less repetitive pattern going around the minor circumference.

If your ring is cylindrical instead of torused, the pattern will be simpler. Around the outside of the main cylinder, you'll probably want the lightest, yellowest part to be on top (the middle of the texture), and then have it grade to brown evenly on both sides as it goes down, around the circumference. For the sides (front & back of the cylinder), you'll want a slightly different effect. One instance of the wide-narrow-medium pattern aught to do it.

For any prongs, ornamentation, etc, you'll want the effect to be a little differet yet again, depending on the shape of each piece. If you've got a stone on top, and you really want to get fancy, if you might want to consider painting a faux reflection of the stone into the ring texture.

I could go on all day talking about options. The point is that to do this convincingly will take some work and some planning. You could, of course, go the simple route, and just put a single uniform texture over the whole thing, but since you seem to be pretty concerned for realism, that's probably not going to satisfy you. It won't look golden if you do. In SL, just as in RL, quality jewelry is all in the detail work, and taking your time to do the textures right is a huge part of that.

The real reason is everyone has seen that movie a few hundred times over already! I'd see it as gold even if the pic was black and white.

Anyway, exifyde, heres a link to show how to work the gradient tool, as what Chosen has said, to create multiple bands of yellowish brownish. I'd personally add some darker almost black bands in the gradient.

http://www.ez-tutorials.com/EZtuts/Photoshop/Textures/Gold-Texture/

Thanks for all the help.. ill get back to it
That tut is going to be very helpfull thanks for taking the time to write all that


I will have a wand soon... if not i mite have to mug you for yours

Hey, I saw some good metal textures at sim = Enchanted that Megz Xevious made. Maybe message her for some if the ones you find by the telehub dont work well.

maybe something here could help ? Gold

Lec, that is gross! LOL

Chosen, are you like a PhD in graphics or something? You know so much stuff about anything to do with graphics. You never cease to awe me with your answers.

I bet, you stay up at night thinking about these tihings?



Jen

i think iv naild it just as you sead u had to stop thinking about it as gold. theres actualy no gold in it


Heres 2 ring samples with the new texture
The 1st one is with shine on, 2nd is with shine off
neather have light on




thanks so much for all the help i was way off the way i was doing it at 1st.

Looks good, Exifyde. If it were me, I might have gone for a little more contrast, but you're not me, and what you've got does look like a gold ring. I'm glad you got it to work.



And thanks for the kind words, Jen.

i whiped this up to kinda show a point ... resolution

a 16x16 image (made using generic gold graident x)
cheesefactory.us/samples/source.jpg

and with no resize, filters, full-bright, or shiny...
cheesefactory.us/samples/result.jpg

16x16 does the trick just fine for simple graidents, ...something to keep in mind