Tileable Textures

Lane Luke made these great fruits - a persimmon and a pomegranate. They look fantastic, don't they?







Now let's turn them around. Oops.







Lane asked for my help - and was generous enough to offer to wait while I made it a tutorial for everyone. :) Kudos for Lane! So let's use Lane's problem as an example for the common problem of texture tiling.





Here are Lane's textures for the fruits. As you can see, the right and left sides of the textures don't match at all.

Note that both the textures and the sculpts themselves belong to Lane. You are licenced to use the textures for study purposes, but not to sell either as textures or as part of an object. Please respect Lane's generosity in providing these as examples.

You can test the edges of the textures (if you use these ones) with a sphere: the results, while not identical to those in my 'final' images, will be quite similar.



Back to the problem. There are several ways to fix the left/right disparity. One method is to use the Gimp's 'Tileable Blur' feature. You find this in "Filters->Blur->Tileable Blur". For this purpose, you want horizontal blur only (we're not trying to wrap the top to the bottom, just the sides to each other).




It helps, but not enough. A wider blur will help more, but will also blur details in the fruit texture. Using the tileable blur tool is always a tradeoff - it's up to you how much you want to trade.




But there are other options.

The one I prefer is fairly simple in concept. I divide the image in half right/left, and swap the halves.








This puts the bad edges together in the centre of the image where I can play with them with smudge and blur tools and smooth them out to make them look right.







Here's the persimmon, first straight, then swapped, so you can see what I mean.






To swap them, first grab a guide with "Image->Guides->New Guide (by percent)".





Use a selection rectangle and let the rectangle snap to the guide, then select the entire left side of the image. Copy the selection, then paste as a layer with "Edit->Paste as->New Layer".

Then do the same with the right side.











Your layers dialog should now look something like this. (Note that I have two copies of the original image - I always keep a second copy, in case I screw up. It means I can always start fresh.)















Select the alignment tool. Click on the left half-image, and use the alignment tool to push it right. Do the same (in reverse) with the originally-on-the-right half-image.



One trick with the alignment tool is that it selects the topmost visible part of the image under the cursor. If you end up with the half-image you want to move underneath the half-image you've already moved, use the 'eyes' in the layers dialog to make the top one invisible while you move the bottom one.





Your image should now have the right half on the left, the left half on the right. You should have two pasted layers in your layers dialog, one for each half. Right click on the top one of the two and select "Merge Down" from the menu that appears.


This will give you one layer, with each half swapped. Duplicate this layer (right click on the layer in the layers dialog, and select "Duplicate Layer") to ensure that if you mess up, you can just duplicate that backup and try again.

The guideline in the middle might bother you. (It often bothers me.) Go to View->Show Guides and untick it.



Now comes the part where if you don't have a drawing tablet, you decide to hit ebay and see if there's a cheap one. Mostly because this part is easier with a tablet than without one.





Study the image you're planning to make tileable. Look for patterns of light and shade, and decide where the light should flow across the border, and where the shade should.






Using the smear tool and the largest fuzzy brush, roughly smear the light and shade across the border. There is no 'right' or 'wrong' for this, just whether it looks natural or not.









Using a smaller fuzzy brush, smooth some of the roughness in the early smears, and try to 'soften' the edges between shades of colour.






Upload this stage to SL (using the preview grid or the temporary upload feature of some of the third party clients) and see how it looks before you move on to the next stage. (Note: the 'seam' will be on the other side of the prim - you may want to either look at the other side of the prim, or offset the texture horizontally by 0.5.)



While this looks a lot better than the original, I think the lower dark patch has extended too far into the light patch. Personal taste. I'll smear that away. This sort of personal taste thing is why I recommend checking it in SL at this stage.


From this point, you just use smaller and smaller fuzzy brushes to smear the edges smoother and smoother until you like how it looks. You can also use the 'blur' tool, once you have the major colours in place and need only to blend the edges into each other.

In the detailed brown part at the top, only use the small brushes - otherwise you'll lose the detail.



During this stage, upload to SL every so often until you're happy.






I can't give you exact instructions - it's very dependent on your personal artistic view.

Above are the original and final persimmons, and to the left is the final texture.



















So now what about the pomegranate? Look at all the detail you'll smear away if you treat it like the persimmon!














Start the same way. Split it in half, put the outer edges together. Get to the stage where the texture looks like this.






Now protect all that lovely detail. Duplicate the swapped layer, so we can play with it later. In the duplicate, go ahead and smear just like you did for the persimmon. Don't worry about losing the detail - we'll get that back later.






Once you're happy with the smearing, we can restore the detail. Move the original swapped layer above the smeared layer, and make both visible. With the original layer selected in the layers dialog, set it to the layer mode "Difference" (there's a dropdown menu at the top of the layers dialog). Select "Copy Visible" from the Edit menu.










Use "Edit->Paste as->New Layer". Make the original swapped layer invisible again. The new layer you just pasted should be black, with reddish parts and greeny-white parts.



This layer contains - surprise surprise - the differences between the unsmeared and smeared layers. Which means it has all our detail! Unfortunately, it also has all the unsmeared background as well.


To see what we're going to do, set that new layer to 'Addition' mode. You'll see the original unsmeared version of the swapped layers show up. All we need to do now is remove the bits of red that replace the smears.



I wish it was as easy as just selecting the red parts out - but set the new layer back to 'Normal' mode and study the red. In some sections, the detail is all different shades of red. I experimented with a bunch of options, and here's what I came up with.










Go to "Colors->Levels". Select the Red channel, and play with the input and output levels. This removes the red tones, bringing them down to blacks and greens. You want to get as much of the reddish background to black as possible, while leaving the detail in greens and pale tones.






Now we make this reddish again (the former background red will stay black, only the greenish/whitish bits will go red). Go to "Colors->Colorise" and change the hue down to a red shade - somewhere between 0 and 15. To keep this from becoming intensely bright, bring the saturation down as well. I chose 20.




Finally, set the mode to Addition. This should give you a pomegranate texture with lovely detail and smeared-out lines.









There is still one minor problem: you will notice some slight seaming where the details abruptly change. Fixing that has to be done the tedious way of zooming in and using cut/paste or pencils/paintbrushes to put details from one side of the seam into the other side of the seam. But at least you have most of the work done!

Using a pre-made texture in SL clothing

This is a more advanced technique, that belongs in the "Making a Tshirt" part of the "How to make SL clothes in the Gimp" tutorial series, but which I fear might confuse total novices if I put it in there directly.

If you haven't read any of that series, you can start at the beginning.

Click here for the exact position of the "Making a Tshirt" tutorial that this mini-tutorial fits in.





1. If the texture is in SL, download it to your hard drive. Open the texture, go to the File menu (up in the top left of the screen), and "Save Texture As..."












2. Open the texture in the Gimp, and paste it into your image as a new layer; or if you're making it from scratch, create it in the Gimp on a new layer.
You may need to 'Scale Layer' to make it the correct size. You can find that in the Layers menu.

















3. Go to the 'tshirt' shaped layer of your image. In part 2 of my tutorials you can see some clear pictures of that layer. Make sure to select this layer in the layers dialog.












4. Use 'select by colour' to select the transparent parts of that image: we're doing that to tell the Gimp what to cut away from the texture layer.

5. Move to the texture layer.

















6. Use 'cut' to cut away the selected parts from the texture layer.



















7. Turn off the colour layer (you won't need it now) (don't delete it - you might want to use it again for a later texture.)


8. Proceed as stated in the rest of the tutorial.

How to make SL clothes in the Gimp (part 4)

In part one, we collected the tools we'd need to make clothing. In part two, we made a basic shirt with no features. In part three, we added highlight and shadow.

NOTE: Enough people have expressed their hope that I get this one finished soon, that I'm putting it up half done. The images will be done soon, in the meantime, feel free to read the text.

In this tutorial, we'll cover seams - both sewing and avatar seams. Wrapping flat pieces around a rounded body creates seams, whether the flat piece is fabric or a digital piece of art.



Avatar seams are the seams that inevitably happen when we match the front and back of the UV maps together around the avatar. I've coloured each UV map section a different colour, to make the avatar seams more visible.


Sewing seams are the representation of seams down the side of fleshworld clothing, and at the shoulders, the hemline, the collar, and everywhere else the fabric is pieced together.
In the example photo, the animation has distorted the avatar shape in this image - usually that seam will hang vertically. The sewing seams are the faint grey fuzzy stripes under the arm, and down the side of the body.


Avatar Seams

Avatar seams are the places where the UV maps meet.


The front torso meets the back torso, both of those meet the head map, the head map has a seam down the back of the skull. The arms actually have a kind of 'top and forward' part, and a 'bottom and back' part. The torso meets the hips, and the legs have front and back sections as well - and the feet are yet another piece.


These seams can look ugly and messy - or can be invisible. Most clothing and skin makers try to make them neat, at least. I like to not just make them neat, I like to conceal them.

Not everyone agrees with me. Some designers point out that it's a fact of life - the seams exist, we have to just accept them. I feel that if you can hide them, your products look better for the effort.

Edge Matching



Robin (Sojourner) Wood's and Chip Midnight's clothing templates have edge match guides. Using those will get you very close to a perfect match, but I've never had a pixel-perfect match from those.

I make the garment using the templates to get close to a match, then trial it on a clothing previewer. I then shave a few pixels off the longer side, or add them to the shorter side, and try again. Yes, it's tedious, but it works.

Another thing to be aware of is the fact that the avatar mesh stretches and shrinks when the shape changes. You will get the neatest edge if you design your clothing so that the avatar seam is crossed on a line in the mesh, not in one of the gaps.

FIXME: show crossing a seam on a line, show crossing a seam in a gap, show on two different sizes.

Wear the various shapes in the Designer's Toolkit while previewing your clothing, to see how your avatar seams look on the various shapes there.

Pattern or Design Matching

If you're using a fabric with a pattern or design, making the avatar seams match is one of the trickiest things to achieve. If you can pull it off, it's fantastic and I salute you. (I usually try to!)

FIXME: Show the Rowan design match.

Some are easier to match than others. When I'm making an abstract, like my Rowan leather outfit, I play with airbrush and smudge and cutting and pasting to make the seams look as if they match.

FIXME: Show the Cameron belt pattern match.

With the Cameron belted pants, I could hide the 'broken' repeats under the belt overlap: and noone expects a belt to repeat a perfect number of times around a human body anyway.

FIXME: image where design carries across av seam, breaks on sewing seam

Another option is to carry the design across the avatar seam and break it on the sewing seam. This not only disguises the avatar seam, it attracts attention to the intentional detail - the sewing seam - instead.

When I'm doing this, I start by cutting and pasting - I put the design on one side (usually the front), and lay the UV map over the top of the design layer.

FIXME: image of this stage.

Then I look at which part of the design crosses the UV map outer edge, and paste the design onto the other side (usually the back) so that, as far as possible, the design crosses the UV map at the same point.

Side note: Planning to have a centre back sewing seam is VERY useful when you're trying to match the side seams, by the way. If you're doing this, work with a different layer for each side of the back, so you don't wreck the left side while you're placing the right.

The paste is never completely right - you're going to have to modify the back to make it fit properly. So preview the garment with the approximation, and notice where you'll need to modify it.

FIXME: try to make an image showing modifications.

Usually, the modifications are just extending or shrinking the pattern enough to make it look almost right. Imagine that you're fitting a lycra swimsuit on a particularly curvy woman - think about how the patterns on such a swimsuit are stretched or shrunk when you look at it.

Once again, the key is experimentation, trial and error.

Sewing Seams

We'll be using the tutorial shirt again. This time, we'll be drawing in the sewing seams.

Try to design your main sewing seams once, and use them over and over again for different garments. Well-fitted, well-sewn garments almost always have the same key set of seams, with variation only for different types of garment construction.

Standard seams

FIXME: diagram of standard seams

Side seams in a well-fitted garment should fall vertically from the armpit to the ankle, down the line that starts from the point of the shoulder. (Almost as if you'd dropped a plumb line from the point of the shoulder.)

The centre back seam should also look as if you'd dropped a plumb bob, this time from the top of the spine.

Seams across the shoulder should go from the point of the shoulder to the one on the other shoulder, as if there was no head or neck in the middle (but, of course, interrupted by it!).

The armhole seam has the most variation of the 'standard' seams. However, the 'default' armhole sleeve starts at the point of the shoulder, drops vertically down the front and back until the halfway point, then curves smoothly to meet under the armpit, only a short distance below the actual meeting point between arm and body.

The crotch seam is another which can have a great deal of variation, but the SL version is a lot easier than the atomic-world version! In SL, just draw the crotch seam as a vertical line down the UV mesh - any shaping it needs happens automatically when you modify the 'pant looseness' slider.

Finally, all the cut edges of the garment need to be hemmed, unless they're on a selvedge. So draw in hem seams, or make a slightly different coloured edge to represent selvedge.

FIXME: make a diagram of optional seams

Variations on seams

Both Feldie and I sew, and we have fashion design books that contain diagrams of the many, many seam and garment construction variations that exist in the world. I strongly recommend hitting your local library (yes, atomic-world library rather than digital) and at least flipping through the pictures.

The diagrams you want will look something like this.

FIXME: diagram showing sleeve types, or cuff types, or bodice variations, collar variations. Maybe a blend of several.

I looked for similar diagrams online, and haven't found any. If anyone does find some, please add the URL to the comments.

Drawing seams

Once you have decided where on the body the sewing seams should be, make only the UV map layer and a white background visible. If you're doing hems, edges, or anything where the outfit outline is important, include that as well.

I find it's easiest to do seams without any distracting details.

Make a seams layer. If you're like me, make a bunch of seams layers and do each seam set on a different layer. If 'too many' layers confuse you, just have a single seams layer.

FIXME: example of seams 'placement' layer over UV maps and shirt outline.

Draw a marker where you think the seam should go. A line about four or five pixels wide will do fine. Bright red if you want it to show up clearly. This is just for placement: it's not the final seam!

Next you spend ages flipping between your previewer and the Gimp, working out that this part of the seam belongs between those UV lines. Don't worry that it looks wonky and distorted on the flat page - make it look right when wrapped around the avatar framework.

Finally, once you've placed your seams, make another new layer. Above the red line of the seam placement guides you've made, draw your seam.

FIXME: examples of both types of seam

I like to make a path along the seam line, then use the airbrush with one of the fuzzy brushes, and a dark grey. When I'm making a light garment, I make the seams layer mostly transparent. With a dark garment, I leave it more opaque. This way I have a bit of shadow along the seam line, but it's not overwhelming for the garment.

If you want to go into detail, try making a line of highlight, a line of shadow, and some 'stitches'. Make sure the highlight is where light would fall on the slight 'bump' where the seam rises, and the shadow would be in the slight 'dip'. Study atomic-world clothing seams, to get the exact placements.

For even more suggestions, check out the thread on seams from the Texturing forum.

And don't think you're finished yet! Preview your seams. You'll find that in some places (such as the crotch) the seams are stretched all yuck. And in other places, they've been shrunk narrower.

Again, there is no magic bullet. Modify, preview, modify, preview, rinse, repeat until done. BUT! Once you've done it once, you'll be able to use the same seam layer on many of your clothes - and use it as a template for other seams on other clothing!

FIXME: seamed, patterned shirt seen across the side-seam, showing both concealed avatar seam and sewing seam.

And .. that's it. That's how to put seams on clothes.

Update to Highlights & Shadows tutorial

I discovered a new feature in the Gimp. Okay, an old feature, but new to me. It's amazing for highlights and shadows, so that's where I put it.

Check out the new "Other layer types" section near the bottom of the Highlights & Shadows tutorial.

Single-prim vendor selling in SL

Many people in Second Life sell their products in scripted vendors. Many more seem not to know how to sell their products at all.

However, Second Life includes a very simple, straightforward way to sell products, with no scripts at all - extremely low lag and reliable. It's built in to the prim editing system.

Preparing the items



To start with, you need something to sell. Making that something is beyond the scope of this tutorial - but I have other tutorials for some of that, and you can always check out NCI and other tutorial places inworld.

Once you have your product exactly as you want it, you should make sure its permissions are set for sale.

If your item is prim-based, set its permissions in the General tab, while it is rezzed inworld. That is more reliable for prim objects than setting permissions in the inventory.

For items that aren't prims, right click on the item in inventory, and select Properties. Set its permissions in the Properties window that appears.

In all cases, we are setting 'Next Owner' permissions - the permissions that the person we give or sell the item to will have. Those permissions can never be greater than the permissions we ourselves have.

When we create an item, we have full permissions on that item. If we give or sell someone else the item with a limited permissions set, then they give it back to us, we only have those limited permissions. Or even less, if they changed the 'next owner' permissions while they had it.

Permissions are Copy, Modify and Resell/Give Away. We usually call the third one Transfer.

If you give your customers COPY permissions, they can make copies of the item, they can keep backups in their inventory while a prim item is in world, they can make multiple outfits of clothing items, or make a full set of dining chairs from one sold chair.

If you deny them copy permissions, then if they accidentally break the item somehow (retexture it, distort one of the prims, delete a script), or if Second Life loses the item from its asset server, they have no backup and the item is lost or ruined for good.

TRANSFER (Resell/Give Away) permission allows the player to pass the item to someone else. Denying players TRANSFER permission means they can't use your item as a component of some sale product, and that they can't sell it when they're sick of it.

If you give a player both COPY and TRANSFER permissions, they can give away or sell it an unlimited number of the items. It is often necessary to do this if you're selling components to other builders - such as animations used in furniture, scripts for just about anything, sculpts for furnishings, buildings or jewelry, or textures used in almost anything.

When you give out both COPY and TRANSFER items, include a no-modify notecard explaining whether the person can resell the item as is or not.

When you give out freebies, include a no-modify notecard explaining that the item is to be a freebie, and whether or not you are willing to let other people sell it as is, or modify it and sell it.

MODIFY permission allows a player to tweak and adjust the item to suit them. There is very little reason for blocking modify permission of animations, clothing or skins created with graphics templates, sounds, and sculpties - the hard work in all of those is done outside SL. Even prim items can't be trivially duplicated - it's a lot of work to reverse engineer those.
Scripts, however, can be trivially duplicated by being cut and pasted, so I would recommend blocking modify perms for those, except for freebie or teaching scripts. In those, I suggest including a comment explaining what rights you pass on.

Preparing the image

Open your art package of preference. If you don't have one, The Gimp is free and available at http://www.gimp.org/. Tutorials are available there as well.

Create an image that answers the questions your customers are most likely to have about your product. For most products, provide an image of what it looks like, or what an avatar does when the product is working.

The price is a good thing to include (though some prefer not to, to avoid having to upload another image when the price changes). I personally think that if having the price visible sells one extra copy of the product, the upload is paid for.

Most customers like to see the permissions at a glance, and many customers want to know what they can expect to get in the product package before they buy it.

Make your image the same shape you want it to be in world. If you want a circular sign, make a circle. If you want a square sign, make a square. If you want a 4:3 ratio rectangle, make that.

Once that's done, if there's any transparency in the image, put a background colour you like behind it. (I find that it never helps to have a sign with transparency. If you disagree with me, skip the background.) Now save your sign in the native format of your art program. .psd for Photoshop users, .xcf for Gimp users.

Now resize your sign to powers of 2. Make each side 128, 256, 512 or 1024: ideally 512 or less. This will probably distort your sign - ignore that, it doesn't matter. It'll get fixed when you put it on the prim of the right shape.

If you want to test the image, making sure it looks right before you spend ten Lindens uploading it, use the SL Beta grid, which is a test version of the SL grid. Go to the wiki page talking about connecting to the preview grid. Once there, upload the image as if you were on the main grid, and put it on the same shape prim you intend to use in the main grid.

When you upload on the beta grid, it will claim it's charging you Lindenbucks, but it's charging you beta grid dollars and not money from your actual SL account. Beta grid dollars get renewed periodically; and stuff in your beta grid inventory WILL vanish every so often - it's a test platform and nothing is stable. But it works great for testing your uploaded creations for free.

Once your lovely sale image has been created, it's time to upload it into SL. Make sure you have 10 Lindens (or more) in your account, then go up to the File menu and select Upload Image. A file browser window will open, and you can find and choose your nifty image.

Select it, and an image previewer will appear. If your file is not square, ignore how squished and ugly it looks - that's just the previewer squishing it into a square shape. Accept it, and it will be loaded into SL, into the Textures folder in your inventory. It can stay there for a while.

We'll put it on its prim of the correct shape a bit later.


Creating the box


So much for preparation work. Now we can actually make our box!

Start by right clicking on the ground. If you're on a prim surface, that's okay too. Just right click on something groundlike. You should get a pie menu with Create in the top right corner. If you don't, you're probably in a place where you can't rez things, and you'll need to move to a sandbox, or to land you own.


If you're renting a shop, make sure you have the group tag associated with that shop over your name. (Right click on yourself, look for Groups, select the appropriate group, hit Activate.)



Once you have the right group activated, or are in a place you can rez, left click on Create. This will change your cursor to a magic wand symbol, and open a little window we call the Edit window. (It might be larger than the one in the image on the right - if so, that's okay.)


Look at the top of the menu in the picture. See how the box shape is highlighted? If the box shape isn't highlighted in yours, left click on the box shape, then move your cursor back to the land.




If you want one of the other shapes, that's okay too. This tutorial is based on the box, because it's easiest and this is for beginners. Just choose the other shape instead.


Now left click on the land again. This will give you a lovely plywood box.


Don't worry, we'll change the plywood part later, and we'll also change its shape so it makes your picture look right.



Packing the box

There might be a MORE >> button in the bottom right corner of the edit window. Click that, and you'll get a rather larger edit window.



If you don't have the MORE >> button, you already have the larger edit window. Leave it that way.

Click on the Content tab.

Look in your inventory for the items you want to sell. (If they're rezzed inworld and you want to package them into boxes, you'll need to take a copy into inventory.)

One you've found them in your inventory, left click and hold, then drag the mouse to the large empty window in the contents tab of your prim's edit window. Release the mouse once you're there.

If you have copy permission on the item, this will take a copy of the item and put it inside your prim.

If you do not have copy permission, this will take the copy you selected from your inventory, and put that in the prim.

Setting the box for sale

Now click on the General tab. Fill in the name of the object in the Name field, and a short description in the Description field.


Then go down to the bottom of the General tab. You will see a Show in Search checkbox. You're planning to sell this, so you probably want to advertise it. So click that checkbox and put a checkmark in it. This box only works if you're on land that is listed in Search->Places, but it does no harm to have it checked even if you aren't.



Beneath Show in Search is For Sale. Put a checkmark in that box. That will enable the text box to its right, which is the price text box. Fill that in.


Beneath the price are three options, Original, Copy and Contents.


If you want the box you're packing to be sold - as in, this exact box goes to the customer, not a copy of the box - select Original. Limited edition items are often sold this way.


If you want the customer to get a copy of the box, select Copy. People who sell furnishings often sell Copy: they rez the furniture inworld, and use these settings to have the furniture literally sell copies of itself.



Contents is the most common setting. When a customer buys a box with the 'contents' setting, they get a folder that contains everything inside the box.


Beneath those settings are the permissions. I recommend setting them to the same permissions as the ones you set for the items themselves, back at the start. (in Preparing the items.)


Finally, there's a dropdown menu. It controls what happens when the customer clicks on the box. I recommend setting it to Buy object.

Technically, you could leave it at that. But a plywood box doesn't make a very good product advertisement!


Adding the image



Click on the Texture tab. Once you have, look for the box with the plywood image, and click on that. This will open a browser window for your textures.






Find the texture you want on the box, and select it.










Shaping and placing the box

Select the Object tab. Click on the Stretch button, and then you can see the little red, green, blue and white boxes around your box.

Click and hold on one of those boxes, then drag it towards or away from the centre of your box to shape the box.

If you prefer, you can use the X, Y and Z Size text boxes to enter the exact size you want the box to be.









If your image doesn't stretch with the box, make sure Stretch Texture in the top right corner of the Edit window has a checkmark in it. You can fix a texture that didn't stretch by going to the Texture tab and setting both horizontal and vertical repeats to 1.

Once your box is shaped to the same aspect ratio you made the image at, the image will look right. All the distortions we did will be undone.

Now you have a box that is shaped correctly, use rotation and position tools to place it in your shop.



The Rotate button provides red, green and blue circles around the box, and you hold down and drag each circle to rotate the box around the centre point.

You can also fill in degrees of rotation in the Object tab, at the bottom left.

The Position button provides red, green and blue arrows, which you click and drag. The Position numbers are also editable in the Object tab.



Additional notes

You can sell your objects in 'boxes' of any shape and size. Most people who use this method use rectangular single-prim boxes because it's convenient, easy, and you can put an informative sign on it.

But don't let that stop you from selling goods in teddy bears, lollipops, or bullwhips if you prefer.