Texture Tools

The purpose of this page is to increase awareness of resources that'll help you texture better in Second Life. Texturing is a fundamental part of a building skillset, as evidenced when you put that dang plywood texture on everything.

This list includes but isn't limited to: programs, tutorials, and packs of textures themselves. I (Torley Linden) am starting with what I know and have actually experienced — please share what you've found useful!

Texture-making programs

• Filter Forge (30-day trial, US$249 preorder, with the possibility to get it for free, PC only) - It's the very spicy (because it's so diverse), no-holds-barred plugin which allows you to make your own Photoshop filters! This isn't some crummy, unintuitive rubbish either: it's top-drawer, with a wealth of presets, many free filters already created by the FF community to download. I'm particularly hoping to see builds inworld use some wall and tile sets made from this. Have you done such a thing? LET ME KNOW OK? :o)

• PhotoSEAM (30-day demo, US$35, PC only) - Helps you make textures seamless like a superstar! Often, after sketching raw 768x768 chunks in ArtRage 2, I'll bring 'em into PhotoSEAM to master as 512x512s, with some buffer 'round the edges so I can cross borders smoothly. What's more, you can apply touch-up effects to come up with some radical variants of your source material. Caveats: it hasn't been updated in 6+ years and it's prone to crashing, but it's the best I've found thus far!

• ArtRage 2 (free edition available, US$19.95 for full version, PC and Mac) - Simple, superb, sexy. It's a painting program with a snazzy user interface and minimal controls. Nope, it doesn't even have Copy OR Paste, but the brush tones are lush. Did I mention the glitter tool adds so much amazing depth? I can almost feel the grains get layered down when working with it. On 2007-02-04, I created some free ArtRage canvases; they're based on some of my textures.

• Context Free (free, PC and Mac and *nix) - An elegant, refreshing program to mathematically generate art — see the gallery for many examples. Starting with the 2.1 beta, you can specify tiled rendering. Even if you don't know programming languages, it's very easy to get into Context Free by changing a few numbers around, then learn more. I've made textures like "Context Free Trees" and "Context Free Flowers" using this.

Texture utilities

Here's some stuff you may never of heard of; I hope it'll make your Second Life texturing easier!

• Texture calculator (free, PC only, 4.9 MB download) - By Adrian Eisenberg. If you've ever wanted to map multiple textures onto a single one for greater efficiency, also known as texture zones, give this a spin. It'll save you the headache of working out the offsets. You can see an actual example by Detect Surface and learn more.

• Backhoe terrain editor (free, Mac only, 572 KB download). - By Zarf Vantongerloo. A simple and elegant terraforming tool for whole regions. It may save you the pain of wrestling with RAW files in Photoshop.

Texture tutorials

• Texture tutorial series (blog) - By Cory Edo. Fun and well-illustrated — more coming!
  • Making tileable textures, part 1 - Answers the often-asked question: "how the hell do I make textures tileable and seamless?"
  • Quick and dirty depth trick for floors - How to unflat your floor textures.
  • Ice texture tutorial
  • Book Learnin’ Review #2 - “The Dark Side of Game Texturing”
  • Accidental land texture trick - How to use a darker, less saturated texture to add gradiated depth to your terrain.
  • Book Learnin’ Review #1 - “3D Game Textures”
  • Book learnin' - Where Cory announces the texture-related books she's going to read and review.

• Idea City's Design Center (inworld) - Follow this SLURL to TP into an intermediate-level set of building and texture tutorials by Forseti Svarog. A fine place to go after you've mastered Lumiere Noir's The Ivory Tower of Primitives lessons.

• "Texturing for Dummies" and some others (PDF) - Not Second Life-specific, but it's a beautifully-published guide with key principles.

Texture packs

• Torley Textures - Fully-permissive and FREE in a variety of surreal, sketchy, painterly, organic, cyberiffic, etc. styles. Click-through for thumbnail previews and the SLURL to get 'em inworld. Also take note of the LOVE TEXTURES, a '07 Valentine's Day special!

• CGTalk's Online Texture Libraries links - Also includes links to tutorials. Note that some of the links are broken — my personal faves are but it's worth a look. Note that most of them aren't seamlessly tiling, so if that's your intention, you'll need to do extra editing.

Misc.

These don't fit under a single category.

• Second Life Design & Textures forum - Where I started out. Discuss texturing tips & tricks with fellow Residents and look at the top for the helpful tutorials stickied in orange.

• Developers Resource Matrix - It's kinda hard to find on our website, but it's got lots of helpful links I refer to regularly. If you're a content creator or looking to Do-It-Yourself, bookmark it and keep it close. Some additional resources are listed which I'm not going to overlap here.