Basic Tongue and Groove Texture

Hi there I am having a terrible time with a really simple thing and it's driving me insane, so I thought I'd see if anyone had any good ideas for this basic need.

I have a boat. The hull is white - the SL Basic texture coloured full-on white. I need to texture some parts of the boat in tongue and groove, where the boards are a matching full-on white. I am attempting to do this with a white background, a black stripe, and a grey stripe, with the striped layers ramped down on transparency.

No matter how I do the stripes - feather, shadowing, anti-aliasing - the effect on the prim is just a series of white and grey stipes. It doesn't look *at all* like tongue and groove.

Does anyone have a better example or a better method of achieving a texture that actually looks like what I'm aiming for?

Thanks!

Can you post some piccies showing what you're trying to accomplish - and what is actually happening?

Just a wild guess but... it seems to me as if you are trying to overlay the gray striped texture and the basic SL texture (plywood). That won't work - you can only have one texture on a prim, and tint it one color with the color picking tool. You'll need to apply the tongue & groove pattern to a wood texture in your favorite graphic program, and use that texture, with the wood grain and the details all in it, on the boat prims. (I'll leave the step-by-step description of that to the PS wizzards here and sorry if I misunderstood your problem)

Here's a quick and dirty guess made with the free Wood Workshop. Was this what you were looking for?

Here 'tis.

Sure! Here is an image of the goal:

http://www.bathroomheaven.com/uploads/High_Gloss_White_T+G_760x580.jpg

The problem as you can see is that the panels are light grey, the highlight is white, and the shadow is dark grey in the RL image.

My attempt with this in SL:

http://handelaar.org/tandg_002.png

I guess it doesn't stink, but it's not perfect

the wood workshop is a free program that can be downloaded here, its a great lil program

http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/

closer? Scale is exaggerated for visibility; source PSD to follow.

Scale is exaggerated for visibility; source PSD to follow.

Scale is exaggerated for visibility; source PSD to follow.

source PSD: grey background + one grey lines + one layer style of inner bevel with chisel

These are instructions for Photoshop. If you're using something else hopefully you can translate.

1. Create a background gradient (or solid color depending on your preferance).

2. Make regularly spaced rectangular selections the size that you want the grooves to be.

3. Copy and paste those stripes to a new layer

4. Set the "layer style" for the stripes layer to bevel and emboss. Set the direction to down. That will create the shading for the grooves. Adjust the settings until you like the way it looks.

5. Crop the image to remove the ends of the grooves so the image will tile properly.

Well, I just spent ten minutes making the textures for you out of the file you posted, one with a gradient and one "tile-able".

Unfortuantely ... SL in it's wisdom refuses to upload them as attachments in any way shape or form, any format compressed, zipped or anything.

When this happens we say "It's *good* that SL made us do that," and look around nervously.

If you send me an email (from my profile page), I can send them too you. Your original source is pretty low quality though so dont expect miracles. Specifically the source was very low contrast and highly "lossy" jpeg (not good) Like as not you'd be better off making them from scratch with that program people quoted.

Wow that's *perfect* thank you so much

Sorry about the earlier confusion re posts - I had the reply window open and then got distracted by RL while everyone was posting. Ooops

I really appreciate it - you're all so nice, thank you!