This is an extension to sets 9-13, and contains a mixture of wall and girder textures. There are 30 distinct textures, plus transparent versions of the window textures, and most of them are 512 x 512 in size.
Here’s a preview. Check the gallery to see all the textures.
As usual, you will find it in-world at the Templar Creations main store, and on the Second Life Marketplace website.
Templar Creations Main Store in Second Life
Yet another addition to the current collection of Steampunk Textures. This adds some variant wall textures, with pipes and windows, along with some canvas textures for airships and balloons. There are 30 distinct textures, plus transparent versions of the window textures, and most of them are 512 x 512 in size.
A quick preview:
As usual, you will find it in-world at the Templar Creations main store, both in Second Life (see the link below), and in Inworldz at at Tulare 134/220/22, as well as on the Second Life Marketplace website:
Yet another Castle set, adding floor and ceiling textures (along with a couple of new wall textures) to match with the two previous sets, 6 and 7.
Here are a couple of previews, and you can check out the entire set in the Gallery (see the sidebar for the links to all the texture galleries).
As usual, you will find the set in-world at the Templar Creations main store, both in Second Life (see the link below), and in Inworldz at at Tulare 134/220/22, as well as on the Second Life Marketplace website:
Another two related sets, this time for castle builds. Set 6 is made up of textures for exterior walls, and Set 7 for interior walls. Both sets have a number of window textures, and if you buy the packs (either in-world or from the Second Life marketplace), you will find that they include a box of transparent versions of the windows. Just rez the box, open it, and ‘Copy to Inventory’.
The window textures (both opaque and transparent) also come in ‘lit’ and ‘unlit’ versions. The preview pictures below mainly show the lit versions, but in the third picture you can see the unlit versions of one of the interior window textures.
As usual, you will find these in-world at the Templar Creations main store, both in Second Life (see the link below), and in Inworldz at at Tulare 134/220/22.
Second Life Marketplace: Castle Textures – Set 6
Second Life Marketplace: Castle Textures – Set 7
I’m clearly on a roll! Here is the next installment of the current collection of Steampunk textures, this time walls with pipes and portholes. There are 30 + 5 textures in all, the +5 being transparent versions of five other textures.
You’ll find them on the Second Life Marketplace, and of course in-world at the Templar Creations main store in Second Life, as well as at the store in Inworldz, at Tulare 134/220/22.
Another set of Steampunk textures, following on from the Instrument Panel textures of last week. This is a collection of (mainly) wall and door textures, suitable for engine-rooms and exteriors.
A quick preview:
As usual, you’ll find these on the SL Marketplace, and in-world at the Templar Creations store.
You’ll also find them in Inworldz, at the Templar Store at Tulare 134/220/22.
This is the first of a new set of textures designed for Steampunk vessels, and will be followed up by sets of wall textures for engine rooms and for living quarters (you can catch a glimpse of one these in the sample picture below).
There are 40 textures in all, at 256×256 size. They tile seamlessly, although they are really intended to be used on single panels (as will probably be obvious).
The set isn’t available in Inworldz yet, but probably will be later today. See the update below.
For Second Life, you can pick up a copy at the Second Life Marketplace, or in-world at the main store (you’ll find it on the second floor).
Update: The set is now available in Inworldz, in the Templar Creations Main Store at Tulare 134/220/22.
If you missed the TextureMania hunt, the Castle Textures set that was the gift from Templar Creations is now available for purchase.
The set of textures consists of miscellaneous stone wall and wood floor textures, designed for Castle builds (although many of the floor textures could easily be used in other kinds of builds).
There are 30 textures, all at 512×512 in size.
Here are a few samples, and you can preview the whole set on the Texture Gallery page.
As usual, you can find them inworld, at the main store, and on the XStreetSL site:
You will also find them at the Templar Creations store in Inworldz, if you are a resident there.
Full-bright and Glow
This is the last article in my short (and rather infrequent) series about lights in Second Life. I’m going to take a look at two elements of textures which are often used in conjunction with lights, and which are also widely misunderstood and misused.
Let’s start with Full-bright. This can be switched on or off on the Texture tab of the Build dialog, and applies to the currently selected texture, or to all the textures on the currently selected object if you haven’t selected an individual face.
What does it actually do? The most obvious effect is that during SL ‘night’ the texture will appear bright (as the name of the option suggests). During daylight the effect is, predictably, less obvious. In fact, sometimes the object might actually appear to be darker in daylight.
Here is the same scene in both day and night. The picture on the wall has full-bright set on it, and you can probably see that the picture is displayed identically in both light settings.
Let’s step back a moment. How does Second Life create the ‘night-time’ effect? Well, apart from changing the sky, it obviously makes all the objects in the world darker. It does this by taking the colour which they should be, and blending it with the ‘nighttime’ colours.
What might be less obvious, is that it does something similar during daylight. It takes the colours, and adjusts them according to the current lighting. This is how you get the distinctive orange lighting effect at sunset that some people complained about when Windlight was first released.
When you set a texture to full-bright, this blending is switched off for that texture, so it always displayed at it’s actual colour, regardless of the current lighting. At night, this has the effect of making the object seem to light up — in fact, it is simply not being darkened.
So much for full-bright. Now what about its companion, Glow? Unlike full-bright, this is exactly what it says. When you set a glow value for an object, it acquires a glowing halo around it. This can range from a subtle, barely visible aura, up to a near-blinding glare.
Transparency tends to lessen the effect of glow slightly (the lower row in the picture has transparency applied).
Under most circumstances, using low values is best, usually no more than about 0.25, and often less than that.
One thing to be aware of is that if two glowing objects overlap in the viewer, the glow effect is doubled. This is not always what you want to happen, so you probably need to be careful if you place glowing objects close together.
Another unfortunate effect that I’ve often seen is where the glow is being used with an object which has a partially-transparent texture. For the glow to show up in this case it needs to be set quite high. When the texture is fully loaded, the effect is subtle and often beautiful. Unfortunately, while the texture is still being loaded, the glow is in full force, and often overwhelmingly bright. There is not much that can be done about this, but if you intend to use this kind of effect, you should be aware of this pitfall.
Glow and full-bright work very effectively together when creating a light. As a simple example, rez a prim, set its transparency to 25 (if you set it too high you will lose some of the effect), then switch full-bright on and set the glow to 0.2. The result will, of course, not actually illumine the surroundings unless you set the Light feature on, but this kind of ‘fake light’ can give the illusion of there being more lights than SL actually supports, especially if you use several of these in conjunction with a single ‘real’ light.
Some SL photographers make use of a interesting effect which happens when an avatar stands in front of a ‘glowing’ texture. This is easier to show than to describe, although the effect is quite subtle, and is caused by the glow slightly spilling over the edges of anything in front of it. Here are ‘without’ and ‘with’ glow versions (this is a rather exaggerated version, with the glow set quite high to make the effect obvious):
However, if you intend to save your photos, there is an issue to be aware of, which is that the Second Life snapshots tend not to capture glow correctly. For example, the scene of streetlights on a wall (above) was captured using my computer’s screen-capture, rather than the Second Life screenshot, which looked like this:
Finally, ‘glow’ works best when it is used for subtle effect, and with some restraint. Whatever you do with ‘glow’, please don’t do this:
Mandi Blanco has organised another hunt, this time dedicated specifically to textures (including sculpt textures). Naturally, Templar Creations is taking part, along with a host of other (very talented — check out the gifts page on the Texture Mania blog!) texture creators. It starts today (1 July 2010), and you can find more information and hints at the official Texture Mania blog.
See you there!
