Free Texturing tool

I just wrote a program aimed at making it easier to work with complex textures in Second Life. Second Life allows for custom textures and per-face application, but determining the settings needed to fit a given portion of an image to a particular face can be tricky.

My program makes that a bit easier by allowing the user to click and drag on a region of the texture, while the program automatically calculates the necessary UV repetition and offset settings.

I have the program available for download on my website at www.purplestatic.com. I'd really appreciate it if people could take a look at it and help with user-testing. Let me know what you'd like to see in future versions, and if anything goes wrong contact me with the details.

Happy texturing!

- Adrian Herbez

This could be a very useful utility, but c'mon - no file requester?

The other stuff you have on the page looks interesting too, bookmarked!

Thank you for your generosity. I'm going to watch this thread and add you as a friend on the board so I can give you feed back.

Thanks to both of you for taking a look.

Candide, if by "file requester" you mean the ability to load in custom files, that's already there- just type while the program's running. If you mean a proper file browser, though (which I agree would be nice), that will take a bit more doing.

I'll be posting future versions at my site, along with notices here in the forums.

Cheers

- Adrian

This is wonderful! Thank you so much for doing this and sharing it with the community. I absolutely hate trying to figure this stuff out when working with texture sheets. You rock.

Adrian yes, I mean something to browse files with (or drag&drop). Because the file input box doesn't react to shift - I can't even type "e:" to it to get to my files. Not to mention that typing filenames with full path takes me waaay back to the past

Fair enough- point taken. Look for that in the future - this is just version 1.0.

Thanks for the feedback

- Adrian

I tried this and it looks like it will be awesome - I tried it with .bmp .tga. .jpg. .jpeg no problems. My problem is typing. When you have a chance to make it file select from a directory or even copy and paste into the box it will be a great tool !!

Hey everybody

So I have the program popping up a file browser now, thanks to Tk (I'm writing it in Python and using py2exe to make the exe- I'll be releasing the python version as well, for Mac and linux users).

I still need to clean it up a bit, but the version up on my site is useuable, and a lot easier to work with than the original, since you no longer need to type in the file name.

To grab the updated version, head to:

http://www.purplestatic.com/texCalc.zip

(note: the filename is the same as the original- you might need to clear your cache/download history to force your browser to get the new version)

Enjoy!

- Adrian

Thanks!

This looks like a really usefull tool, thanks. Am going to give it try.

Thanks for your generosity Adrian.

I appreciate your generosity Adrian. Thank you!

Indeed. I would love to have something like this instead of the calculator and pieces of paper I use now. Unfortunately it's a Windows thingie.

Any chance of writing one for a Mac?

A lot of the best texture artists use Macs you know.

Thank you.

Tip

bump?

this is Awesome!! thankyou!
-LW

Zooming would be neat feature for larger textures.

Yeah, or just being able to put it full screen. Still a massive timesaver.

I have been using this for a while and find it very useful. One thing I often need is a huge wall to strech a texture on - this application is fantastic for figureing out the offsets. There is one feature that will make this even more useful.

I often have to load textures into PhotoShop and add guide lines onto a copy of the image to evenly divide it up. For example, I have a photo and want to display a huge version on a wall made of of 10x10 squares arranged in a grid of 6x6 (so 60mx60m). To do this, I load the texture into PhotoShop and add guide lines, to a copy of the texture, so that it gets evenly divided into a 6x6 grid. I then use your application and get the offset of each part of the texture.

A better approach would be to have your app. divide the texture on its own into a user-configurable grid, and then have it output the offsets into a text file or another window on the screen (a richTextBox for example). This would make a huge difference in usability. Users could also use the grid pattern as a guide when working with less repetitive textures.

-2fast

Yeah definately would be cool to have grid lines too. Currently it's pretty frustrating to do precision work with this. But the application is great timesaver, just could be even better.

Multiface texturemapping has never been made easier. Until now. ;D

*hugs* You just made my day. ^^

Hmmm... thanks for the feedback, everyone. I agree that zooming/fullscreen and grid lines would be good. I'll definitely put that into the next version. It might be a little bit before that happens though. My SL devtime is currently focused on
a way to build content for SL using Maya
Once I get that finished off, I'll start in on TexCalc v2.0

Thanks for the comments, and I'm glad you're enjoying the tool!

- Adrian

Ok, I hacked together a small script for photoshop that does a similar thing.

http://lemoo.net/files/SLTextureParametersSelection.jsx

Save it in Presets/Scripts in photoshop's folder, (re)start photoshop and it should be visible under File->Scripts (you can assign a keyboard shortcut to it too now). Open or create a texture, drag a rectangular selection and run this script. It will give you the repeats/offsets for SL for displaying the selection.

Since it's a script, it should work for both pc and mac. Not sure about photoshop versions, report any problems here.

*applause*

I love it! I hereby endorse this product and/or service.