Exporting textures

Is it possible to export two textures from SL, combine them, then upload the resulting texture? Or is there some way of accomplishing this within SL? I am trying to overlay two textures with alpha channels, and one of them disappears randomly with camera angle. Thanks.

You can export textures if you have full permissions on them. You can't if they are no-copy or no mod or no transfer.

To export, view the texture, and then look on the File menu for an 'export texture' option. No charge.

Modify to your heart's content in Photoshop or whatever, and save as 24 bit TGA if you have no alpha mask, 32 bit if you have alpha transparencies. Do NOT use the compressed format! Saving at higher than 512 x 512 is a waste of effort, because SL will reduce it to 512 x 512 on import. For the least distortion, import images that are 32, 64, 128, 256 or 512 pixels in each direction. Any other aspect ratios will get streached to one of those, and odds are you can do it better in your graphics app than SL's automated conversion will do it. Importing a texture costs L$10, and is also on the file menu.

Laying one alpha-masked texture close to another invokes what is called the 'alpha sorting bug'. It's a plague on almost all 3D rendering environments, causing the sorting order to get screwed up. You see it a lot if you look through alpha-mapped tree branches at a wall that has an alpha mapped window in it. Looks like there are leaf-shaped holes in the wall.

If you can view it but not export it, just stretch the preview to fit your screen and take a screenshot. Paste it into your image editor and rescale the image to the correct size. Will be harder for alpha textures, but you can still cut it out manually. This is called 'stealing' by some people, but who cares.



Previous versions of SL import all the way up to 1024. Not sure if they've upped this to 2048 now. The aspect ratio is always 1:1, 1:2, 1:4 and/or 1:8. So it can be 128x128, 128x256, 128x512 and so forth. Doesn't need to be square.



To tell the client which to display in front and back, make sure the two prims do not intersect. Then set one of them a little more transparent than the other. 2% for example. And it no longer gets confused.

Anyone that has to resort to such a crude method of theft has absolutely no useable skills whatsoever (even when it comes to stealing).

Baron Hauptmann probably just wants to experiment something with his build. I'm sure you have your own vested interests to protect your apparently lovely products, like so many self righteous vendors in SL, with that comment.
I do resort to these methods. So I guess you're right.

So this is what you were explaining to Francis last night. I was busy wiping my computer and having a blonde moment I'll try this out as soon as I get home.

And yeah, I agree you have no usable skills whatsoever, Cot, even when it comes to stealing my M&Ms and Kinoko-no-Yama. But you are always welcome to take a screenshot when I'm showing you my RL mug shots, add nostril hair and post it on hotornot.com.

i care

A i make detailed, comlicated low rez texture, now they are not much of a chore for me, but i dont want some lamer getting my texture spanning it to 1280x1024 fkin it up and reimporting them to sl...

B theres better ways to steal a texture, if you insist on doing it why are you gonna screw it up even more than SL's jpg 2k compression (x2 now)

C there are litterly thousands of texture respositorys on the internet, cant you find your own?

D there are many many FREE programs out there that a retarded drunken monkey could use to produce high quality textures with 10 min of playing around in the software

E if you know how to cut out alpha from a non alpha image WFT are you stealing for anyways, jeebus it takes me 10 min in the gimp to produce an original, and i have no real experiance in moderen graphics before SL, theres plenty of plugins and how-to's out there

I believe if someone wants to experiment with something, let them do it. If it means messing with poor quality stretchy textures, so be it. Every action is a learning process. A child can learn that fire is hot by either listening to an adult explain it, and also sticking their hand in it.



If there are, teach people how to do it, instead of complaining. My knowledge is rudimentary at best. A person who is hell bent on stealing will do it, regardless.



I agree here. Some primates can be taught to produce textures on par or better than yours.



People here are really full of drama. They enjoy creating drama. It makes them feel good. They put reinforcing statements to reinforce the idea that they are righting something. Even sprinkle derogatory remarks to make themselves feel superior in some way. I even do it sometimes because its fun to see people inflamed. Sometimes I'm not even sure if I'm correct myself, but it doesn't really matter. The entertainment value is too much to ignore.



I have. But I submitted it to Ahso Hashimoto as a resume for the next sequel of Hirsute Japanese Office Ladies in Pantyhose. He'll be calling you soon.

You don't know that. Unless he has told you that, you are just making an assumption.



I wear one of Namssor’s “apparently lovely products” everyday. And NO, I do not have any affiliation with her, in fact, for reasons of my own; I do not think I will ever buy another of her products.

However, she creates absolutely beautiful work. The detail and effort that goes into her skins is quite apparent to anyone who has ever seen one. If you had thought before you spoke, you would have realized that there is no way anyone could “stretch” one of her skins across the screen and do a usable screen capture. So, you’re quoted statement above; besides being offensive to Namssor, and anyone one who proudly wears one of her skins is flat incorrect.




You said it, I didn’t. However, just for the record, I see no difference from people who attempt to steal other people’s work than a griefer who attempts to harm people SL experience. Catfish have more pride than either of them.

Jen

This is absolutly apauling and should not be done. Who cares? I should think anyone who makes textures in SL will care. And I think anyone whose been caught and been punished by LL will learn not to do it again.

Baron, it is as the first poster specified, possible to export textures you have full permission on. You open them up from your texture folder in your inventory, click file, and choose Save Texture As. As for overlaying them, I should think Photoshop, PaintShop Pro or Gimp would be able to do that.

I urge you however, not to take Cottonteils advice, as its against the rules, could get you punished and just shouldn't be done.

* Puts on her "Texture Artist" nametag for TRU *

There are plenty of places in SL where one can purchase full-permissions textures for use in their creations. Textures-R-Us, where I work, is one such SL business. A typical texture from us had all permissions granted, and costs L$30, or we sell bundles of ten associated textures go for L$300. Some are more expensive, because of extra effort required to create them. But I don't think that these are unreasonable prices to pay for good quality textures. That's what? Ten cents each in real money? And LillyBeth, Eric and I are constantly seeking to improve what we offer, and we will create new textures to order.

Our textures and those purchased from other texture merchants can be used to create your products for personal use or for resale. The only real limitation we place on them is that you may not resell them or give them away as raw textures. If the first poster wanted to combine two or more of our textures as he proposed, and import that as a new texture for his own use, that would be perfectly fine. It's expected, even.

When I first got started in SL, I did, on occasion, do screenshots of a texture someone else created. I did this primarily so I could fill in a missing piece in a build, or add a new feature that matched well with the other artist's efforts. For example, to make a shojii screen door for a building that had no such door, and to match it's shojii screen walls. Or to add a step that matched the floor texture. And I never resold any of that. Frankly, any screenshot of a texture is going to be lower quality, and really isn't worth using in good work.

If you want to have the textures combined and you want the job done right, you will need to contact the person that created the textures if you don't have full permissions. Even if you do have full permissions it's still better to contact the original creator because they won't have to upload the images back to thier hard drive. Most content creators are happy to offer changes to their textures, especially if it's a simple 60 second request such as this.

It's a simple fact that the lossy JPEG 2000 compression that SL uses produces a 2nd generation copy of the original at best. Anyone can test this with Photoshop and a difference calculation. Once you have to go through that upload process even once you are looking at 3rd generation copies of an original. Some people may say "who the frak cares, they still look good to me". Well, look again, especially if it's a skin or any other texture that relies on subtle changes in color and gradation.

The theft method described below is so crude that it's laughable. It's equivailent to taking an orignal Ansel Adams photo to Kinko's and running it off on one of their copy machines.

I'm sure Osgeld will be happy to give you all the DIS-INFORMATION you want. Like you said, your knowledge is rudimentary, and we'd be happy to help you keep it that way.

Quite so. A lot of the requests I do are things like "Can you add that window to this wall, and have the inside of the window alpha-mapped to be transparent?". We have no problem at all with such requests, and wherever possible will do the work from the original master images, which are often created at more than twice the resolution of what gets uploaded to SL as the final texture.

We have also worked in concert with competing texture creators, getting permission from them to combine one of our textures with one of theirs, to meet a client's specific needs. For example, the customer is already using a wall texture that they purchased from someone else, and they want us to put one of our windows on a piece of that wall, so it all matches. The artists are usually quite willing to come up with an agreement on such work, if you just ask.

Oh, I'm sure it happens all the time, but that doesn't make it right. And I know a lot of people who care.

If you want to experiment with textures on prims, go to slexchange and get my free 512x512 texture with grid marks to see how it works for you. It's free.

In fact, I"ll post it here and give you full permission to steal it

Save yourself the upload fee and get it from SLX Free!



There is no excuse for stealing.

Blaze, you're reading my mind! I was just thinking about making a texture grid of some sort, and here you go and post something better than what I was imagining! Thank you!

Didn't mean to start something . . . :\

I have uploaded several textures, played some with alphas, but had not yet realized that there is indeed an export function. Better than that, I hadn't thought to look to see who created the principle texture in question and IM her about either making a new texture or giving me the files necessary to do so.

So, at this point, I have IMed her and am waiting for a response.

Thank you for the kind attention and help!

Baron

Yep! Grids are wonderful working with textures.

I have one, too, that you can grab from my Texture Tutorials in Benten.

Here's the copy to use on your machine, so you don't have to worry about downloading it from SL.



You'll probably find that one gird is better for some things, and others are better for others. So it's nice to have a bunch of them.

(And Cottentiel, by now you know that many people care. Thanks for the warning about you, though! I'm sure that we'll all bear that in mind.)

Oh! And by the way, I'm afraid that changing the transparency of one prim so that it's slightly more than the other doesn't affect the Alpha Sorting Bug in any way. I just did a small experiment, and there was no difference between two large prims set to 50% Transparency and 52% Transparency, and the same two prims both set to 50% Transparency.

Thank you, Robin. That looks like a very useful grid! I collected all the notecards for your tutorial while I was on my lunch break, and took a moment to peruse your shop as well. Very nice! I have a few friends that I shall have to send to you, for the specialty items that you sell.

LOL how ironic If im not mistaken I believe it was me.

Baron wanted a trellis making one for an underview angle so the trellis was under the Ivy and one for the over view so the ivy was ontop of the trellis.

We met in store then went to his build, back to the store we picked out the wood trellis he wanted me to work with and I used some Vines I bought for thats I use for custom works only ( not sold in game) and created exactly what he was looking for.

Did it in 15 minutes, added one with lighting and shadow for the underview version too and he paid me more than i asked I believe $100 for 3 textures and was delighted!

(and to the person who is to cheap to spend 10L$ to load his own texture)

THATS what makes SL go round...If everyone just cut corners, stole, begged, borrowed and looked after themselves and ' who cares' to everyone else..you wouldnt have a virtual platform to stand your rather tunnel visioned, one sided, ' I hate vendors because Im too cheap and lazy to create anything in SL unless its free and for my use only' virtual avatar on.

( think about that for a while bud!)

Lilly, He paid you $100? You must be delighted!

LOL Sorry. I couldn't help myself. It is early Sunday morning here and, I am giddy on caffeine.

Jen

LOL. Me cheap? I'm not the one who paid you 100L.

It's called building good business relationships ( apparently something your not familiar with) he ended by saying and I quote " Well I know where I will be coming for my textures in the fututre!" And for 100 wasnt about the money as cliche as this sounds, the fact he was happy and pleased meant more to me that 100L$ but I like to think Ive won a
new repeat customer.

I seldom do house calls but he caught me at a quiet time and I told him so. It's good to get out and see exactly what ppl need for their builds. I dont build anything and stuff I make is all custom requested, without customers ideas and requests and understanding exactly what they want & why helps me make a better texture.

LOL and yeah 100L$ isnt gonna make my day but him telling his friends about me will

Girl, you rock!

I'm not even in the business of doing business. Sure some have given me money for doing things. But trying to win customers has never been an issue nor something I'm interested in at the moment. I'd rather people learn to make their own and improve from there. I would even blame some of the crappiness of the SL environment to the commercial nature of everything. But thats another story.

I'm sorry, but you might just be better off experimenting by yourself in 3D Studio Max and Photoshop or similar applications for a while. You're not making friends here, and I don't think you care. Come back with an Alt when you're ready to play nicely in the sandbox, so we may judge you impartially.

PS. Sorry, Chosen, you can go ask Chip just how much this sort of crap gets under my skin (pun intended).