New content for the Opensim Library

[Chin Rey]

I'm working on an upgrade of the Library content, starting with the textures, and need some input: What do we need?

I do not want suggestions for specific textures at this point but rather what kind: wood? terrain? fabric? bricks? plants? etc., etc.

There is a limit to how many textures we can have. It hasn't been determined yet but think lower hundreds, certainly not a thousand. That means the textures have to be as versatile as possible and we do not ones that are hardly ever used.

Any suggestions?

 

[Sheera Khan]

I think, I'ld start with some terrain textures like grass, sand, gravel, stones, forest-floor etc where the tiling isn't obvious. Problem is: that seems to be really difficult as any patches or structures will be inevitably visible in tiling yet without such structures the textures will look boring.

 

[Sid]

I would go for
- Building materials: wood, floor tiles, concrete, shingles, wallpapers
- Ground covers: grass, water, rock, sand
- Textiles: even colored and seamless, quiet patterns
- plant materials: bark, leaves, blooms

 

[Sheera Khan]

I would go for
- Building materials: wood, floor tiles, concrete, shingles, wallpapers
- Ground covers: grass, water, rock, sand
- Textiles: even colored and seamless, quiet patterns
- plant materials: bark, leaves, blooms

Quite some of those can be found from the former TextureHaven-Site. License is free and they even include some materials

 

[Chin Rey]

Quite some of those can be found from the former TextureHaven-Site. License is free and they even include some materials

Thank you but the problem with textures like those is that they are made to only work with materals. Without they look flat and bland.

But this brings up an important question, should we include materials? Materials count towards the total number of textures so if we include them, there will be fewer textures. Is that worth it or not?

 

[Sheera Khan]

For Terrain textures I'ld say no, since tiling would lead to patterns in the result. But i.e. bark might greatly benefit from the usage of materials. And even in OpenSim I think we can say that most viewers support materials.

 

[Soen Eber]

I don't know what it's called - if it even formally exists - but I created a seamless texture with a number of subtle white to transparent gradients that "heals" the endless repeating same texture effect. A better effect might be white to gray and making gray transparent. It's a pseudo shader that gives a faux realistic lighting effect. My Jananese home in Bradmoor uses this extensively on the floor and as a top layer it can be examined (pretty sure I made it full perm). I think the source texture might have been a soap bubble texture I applied grayscale, polar, and seamless filters/transformations to in GIMP and then played with the level curves.

For lighting, it's been amazingly versatile.

 

[Monica Dream]

I know what I need but I'm not sure about anyone else as far as textures goes. New and improved terrain textures would help, definately -especially sand and snow ones.

I think it's more important to have some basic mesh assets like different kinds of trees and rocks, nothing exotic ...just something better than the default system/LL plants.

 

[Jupiter Rowland]

I'd say building materials like concrete, bricks, wood or cobblestone are the most important because they're the most likely to actually be used. Maybe terrain if you can find/make something decent that doesn't repeat too obviously. But people still make their own prim houses or prim pavement. I guess some stoop as low as botting plain pavement from SL because today's popular freebie sims no longer offer raw building materials, so they think they have no other choice.

I'm not sure about plant textures. Making good-looking plants that can compare to what you can get from other creators (even legally) is hard and not worth it, so plant textures would only make sense on stand-alone, non-Hypergrid grids that also refuse to import anything from anywhere or whose admins don't know they can import entire sims worth of content as OARs. And I don't think anyone on the Hypergrid still makes plants the 2007 way.

Plain fabric makes even less sense to me. Fabric textures are mostly only really useful if you have them outside the viewer as graphics files that you can GIMP for whatever specialised use-case you need them for, no matter whether it's clothing or curtains. I can only see furniture, pillows included, as a use-case for plain tiled fabric textures.

 

[Monica Dream]

Yeah, that's why I suggested some basic mesh plants -as an alternative to making them the 2007 way.

I think it's more important to have some basic mesh assets like different kinds of trees and rocks, nothing exotic ...just something better than the default system/LL plants.

 

[Monica Dream]

But this brings up an important question, should we include materials? Materials count towards the total number of textures so if we include them, there will be fewer textures. Is that worth it or not?

I missed this; I have had good luck with adapting some of the opensim library files -specifically the brick wall one...to normal map (specular too but not as great). It's kind of a case-by-case basis.

What's really annoying to me is that a lot of things (like wallpapers) in Filterforge are diffuse map (? the regular texture) only; no shiny, no specular.

I've never bothered converting plant textures to materials; I just kinda figured the results would look abominable.