Reading Radar

One of the things that sets builds apart is good textures. Instead of relying on the freebie ones and any of the textures you can buy in SL, generally you’ll want to make your own. The hard part about that is making them seamless, or tileable (isn’t that a word?) so that you can have them look good on any size prim.

If you’re a Mac user, consider ImageSynth2, a non-free, non-cheap ($99) app that can either be run as a standalone program or as a photoshop plugin. It’s versatile in that you can pick “chunks” of your input images to use, define the percentage of contribution to the image you want a particular chunk of image to have, etc, etc.

I made this tatami texture with basically no messing with the settings or doing anything other than dropping chunks of original down and then letting imagesynth2 come up with the edges for me. Then I added the fabric on two sides of the tatami, uploaded, and used it to see the results.

Like any tiling texture, it has some repeating patterns in it, but it is seamless and it looks pretty good for not really working too hard at it. Compared to a seamless tatami texture I made from the same original snapshot of tatami, it came out cleaner and the repeat lines aren’t quite as strong. And it took a LOT less time to produce than me doing it by hand, and tatami is a pretty easy texture compared to some others you might need a tileable copy of.

Anyway, not a cheap option but I think a good one if you’re going to be making seamless textures for your builds in-world.