June 28, 2007 by Nobody Fugazi
Posted in
Yeah, yeah. Everyone thinks that you need to use Adobe Photoshop to create textures - poor souls. The truth is that you don't have to spend a dime to get started with working with your own textures in Second Life - and now the secret of the silent penguins is out for the general public - I added the Gimp to the Second Life wiki entry on Texture Tools because...
Well, I suppose because previous folks were more interested in spending money.
Truth be told, I've been using Gimp for Second Life textures for quite some time. I have yet to use anything else for making textures - and I never even bothered with graphic design before I started Second Life. It takes some getting used to because it is powerful and the interface is designed to be able to work on every major operating system. There are plenty of tutorials available all over the web for it - but there are a few random pointers to get you started in making clothing and other things:
- TGA files are needed for lots of clothing which allows the skin to show - transparency - and this is called the alpha channel. Images like this are handled in layers, like pieces of paper on top of each other, and the transparency layer is one that takes new folks some getting used to.
- To download a texture from your inventory in SecondLife, such as the textures of the free clothing in your library, you need to open it and then select 'File->Save Texture As'. This will only work for textures which you have the permissions for.
You can talk Photoshop or any number of things - but if you want a powerful graphics editor which works perfectly well with SecondLife textures... Break out the Gimp.
And if you really want to spend money, use the Gimp anyway and pay Nobody Fugazi large sums of money in world so that you get rid of all that money that is irritating you so much. I'll do my civic duty. :-)
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One more thing about GIMP...
There is, or at least was, a GIMP support group in Secondlife. When I started using GIMP and had some problems switching over from PS, they were a great deal of help.
Cool.
It just seemed so very strange that after 4 years, Second Life's wiki didn't even point to the Gimp.
Shocking! Best software available at no cost... but then, they started with Maya instead of Blender for sculpties, so it is pretty apparent that they may have open sourced the client, but Linden Lab is lacking in the FLOS culture.
gimp's been around for long time on the forums
I think it's just that it wasn't on the wiki? Cause I know I've seen people discussing using Gimp for years on the forums. Glad you added it to the texturing tools section, that will help people out, if they're looking for a quality image editor that they don't have to pay for. My guess would be that pshop cs3 will have lots of options that gimp won't, but that most people would rarely get to those options in cs3 anyway...
--Rez
Good to hear that...
there was discussion in the forums. Gimp does what most people will need it to do...
Honestly, I rarely have looked at the forums. Too much noise for signal. I guess Google doesn't index the forums, too. Hmm.
ive been using Gimp for years...
but if people want a more traditional interface... paint.net is free also.