Understanding Textures
Teaser
Textures are very important in Second Life. Without textures, every object in Second Life would appear in a single color. Textures are image files which can be used to “wrap” the geometric primitives (prims) used in Second Life . Since textures are images, they can add a great deal of realism to prims.
Every item in Second Life starts out with a simple wood texture. Figure 1.1 shows a simple box which has had a different texture applied to one of its faces. The other faces display the default wood texture.
Figure 1.1: A Textured Box
Textures are not created inside Second Life. Textures are usually created in a program, such as Photoshop or GIMP. This book will focus primarily on Photoshop. However, one chapter is devoted to explaining how to use GIMP in place of Photoshop. GIMP is a free, open-source, image editing application. Photoshop is a proprietary, closed-source, commercial application. Figure 1.2 shows a typical Photoshop screen shot.
Figure 1.2: Editing a Texture with Photoshop
Textures can also be designed to be tiled. A tiled texture can be repeated many times without showing any “seams.” For example, consider Figure 1.3.
Figure 1.3: A Tileable Texture
This figure shows a single texture. Because this texture is tileable, it can be seamlessly applied to a large object in Second Life. The tileable texture will simply repeat, as shown in Figure 1.4.
Figure 1.4: A Large Object With Tileable Textures
Tileable textures can be used for more than just tiles. Figure 1.5 shows a tileable texture used to create a large paved area. It is nearly impossible to tell by looking at it, but this paved area is actually a 10 X 10 array of 100 tiles.
Figure 1.5: A 10 X 10 Array of Tiles
Tileable textures can be used for any pattern that needs to be repeated over a large area.
Textures can also include transparent regions. This is done through the use of something called an alpha channel. Figure 1.6 shows a texture with transparent regions.
Figure 1.6: A Texture with Transparent Regions
Textures will be covered in greater detail in Chapter 2, “Textures and Alpha Channels” and Chapter 3, “Tileable Textures.”
