Texture dance

One of the very first things Ches and I built on Love was the deck. The basic visual of it, a translucent deck, vaulting out from the cliff face, over the water, has been a constant in the build, from the beginning. what's been there just as long, has been a sort of continual unhappiness with the actual texture on the deck's surface. I think, over the past six weeks, it's been about 20 different colors and variations.

So, a few days ago, Ches says, "Hey, I saw this cool bridge, with an amazing texture on it, go take a look at it for the deck." and dropped a slurl on me. I hopped, and found a bridge, over an gully, with a lovely star field texture.

Well, ok, the texture didn't seem to be for sale. So.. I went poking around a bit, and found a nice seamless textures with a star pattern on it. That yielded the blue, stay speckled deck on the left. Now, this was better, but it wasn't nearly as pretty as what we wanted. So, off to Google images, to look for pretty starfields. A small hunt later, yielded some very pretty shots of real stars, and, better still, lots of pretty galaxy and nebular shapes. There was only one problem. If you're going to lay down a texture on a prim, you really need to have it be a seamless one. For those who haven't delved into the details of SL prim texturing, this means, if you repeat it, you don't want an obvious line where the images repeat.

Off to Google again, for tutorials on creating seamless images. (Something, I've been muttering about learning how to do for months, but never quite gotten around to doing.) Half an hour of muttering later, I had three images to try, and this one seemed the best. Ches added the lovely statue she got as a rez day present, and we finally are pretty happy with the way the deck looks. As with any building we do, it's provisional, and will probably change again, but, for the time being, we can dance over the ocean, without obsessing about how to improve the texture, and that's good.

~ Zha