Many thank-yous to Jason Wright of J Wright Design for his fresh and inspired help in filling a much-needed gap: he pointed out that Torley Textures would be more useful with preview sheets so someone can see what all the textures look like at-a-glance.

This is especially applicable in Second Life, where texture browsing can be a chore. Not just talking about it but doing something, Jason surprise-presented me with his initial designs! After some rounds of iterating and me noticing after all of this time, some of the Flickr sets were backwards alphabetically, he sent me the final revisions, and they're splendid. For example, for Volume IX:

Now when you get Torley Textures @ Here island, you'll notice a preview (aka "contact sheet") in every series' folder. As I mentioned, I've included them on the web too as well as the ultra-download of all texture packs IN ONE CLICK — but note that there is an inconsistency: "DREAMS" and "PLACEHOLDER" in the megapack do not have contact sheets as they fall out of the "regular" continuity. "DREAMS" is an inworld rarity and "PLACEHOLDER" is easy enough to discern — its distro kiosk is currently to the left of the regular Torley Textures, as shown here:

MORE »

I’ve had a few astute requests recently to make all the Torley Textures available as an easy downloadable archive. This is also convenient if you aren’t a Second Life member and want to partake in the lush loveliness, or want to modify them then upload inworld.

I asked myself, “Why didn’t I do this earlier?” and then I recalled how I intended to get around to it, but lacked time at the time. (Ah, tricky tricky time.) Fast forward to today, and here we are, over 600 textures of awesomeness:

» DOWNLOAD TORLEY-TEXTURES.ZIP

Enjoy, and let me know in the comments if you have any questions — you can use them freely on commercial products & services, just don’t sell them as-is (that’s foolish, because I’m giving them away for free right here).

On a lark, I crafted 10 new placeholder Torley Textures. The purpose of these is simple: to make it easier to model a build's geometry. In Second Life, every created object not copied from a prior source has a plywood texture on its surface:

It's a familiar cliché, but not pretty, nor useful, because its flatness makes it difficult to differentiate # of texture repeats and edges of prims, among other things.

Over time, I've noticed more builders using their own placeholder textures. Fine prior examples include:

Sometimes, said "placeholders" end up being used in the final build, because they provide a clean, if simple aesthetic. Subtle shading looks great on a variety of things, from big towers to coffee tables, and certainly beats a flat, dead white. (Related, see my Add2Shiny textures, which are designed to give shiny surfaces a touch more character; subtle and effective.)

While I don't yet know a way to auto-replace the staid plywood — wonder if any Open Source contributors have or are thinking of taking a crack at it? — it's useful to have placeholder textures as convenient utilities. So, in addition to what I've done before, have these for FREE:

As with all Torley Textures, just go to Watermelinden Land inworld and click on the board to get 'em. They're near Grasmere (186, 2, 28).

Special thanx to several Filter Forge creators, including photoman for his Vignetted Edges filter. Makes it a lot easier to come up with your own.

Note that these placeholders haven't/aren't planned to be rolled into a formal larger release of textures, which is why I haven't integrated them with the main TT display.

Now that these are out in the wild, they join the good company of shadow + light kits, and textures with colored mappings to help with precision alignment (related: my previous post about Idea City's Design Center), such as:

So whether you build a lot or a little — or none at all but are curious — what other kinds of "utility" textures would you find useful?

… for all those times that you need one. Including when you're thinking of sculpted prims and cubed watermelons, which is appropriate, because I sourced this texture:

from this photo:

graciously distributed under a CC license.

I have a dream. That ongoing dream is to provide quality textures to help assist your artistic endeavors, and it's been coming good, pure, and true. Now, the saga continues! The chorus in my head that tells me:

Chorus: "Torley… what do the Residents want?"
Me: "They want textures!"
Chorus (singing harmoniously): "Yes. Do it."

must be obeyed.

And now, they're here! Not just 1, not even 2, certainly not 3… it's…

4 NEW PACKS OF TORLEY TEXTURES! FREE FOR YOU!

In this veritably swatchtastic extravaganza, you get:

• Torley Textures LUSH - It's good to be green; the first pack I earlier announced.
  
   
• Torley Textures DESAT - An easily-tintable collection of grayscale textures.
  
   
• Torley Textures VIII - A variety garden of wild, crazy colorfulness.
  

  BUT WAIT, THAT'S NOT ALL! @ no extra charge, YOU ALSO GET…
  

• Torley Textures IX - More MoRe MORE of the uber-eclectic!
  

Each collection consists of 50 textures, and all of these are 512×512, seamlessly tiling, and you can use 'em however you like.

In these newest series, I delved into numerous graphics processing methods. I applied Filter Forge (one of my fave art tools) extensively and must've gone through 100+ filters during the course of this amazing journey. From glitched cut-ups to rough-up wall-like things to psychedelic rainbow trips, the ante's been exponentially upped! I took Commodore 64 screenshots and granularized them, I splashed digital paint on mah pixel canvas and posterized the strokes, I took fractal formations and twisted them beyond recognition with noise distortion, etc. — let's just say these experients (not sic) have escaped the lab for your happiness!

You can either download Torley Textures via the web in lossless PNG (use the links above), or come to Watermelinden Land in Second Life. Look for the big wall o' textures…

and click the panels to get packs! Aaaand if you end up making kewlness with Torley Textures, please lemme know, k? I'd love to see your creativity!

The Council ruled that a single LUSH set of Torley Textures would not be enough. There are new filter worlds to colonize and mine for texture spice, uncharted galaxies with procedural civilizations to seek out. Extra resources were duly allocated, more personnel activated aboard our starcruisers.

And thus, while it'll take us longer to get to our destinations, we'll make many, many new friends along the way.

Come with us and flourish!

[UPDATE - 11:44 AM PDT] You can get tFinder inworld @ Wallaroo (250, 11, 304). Look for something like this:

I keep long wishlists of people, places, things I hope to see come true in Second Life: some already have.  One that found me in particularly good graces was after Pompo Bombacci (thanks Pompo!) let me know about Cid Vilas' tFinder.

What's it do? First, let's start with some numbers: while I write this, the tFinder is the #1-selling item on SL Exchange. It's also got 130 votes averaging out at 4.5 numbers, and 17 member reviews. Those of you who know me, also know I place context around metrics. In this instance, what makes it so compelling?

One sentence: texture organization is hell.

Another sentence: opportunists in this field will find ample voids to fill.

And Cid Vilas is such — in the parlance du Torley — a chess player.

Ever since my early days of admiring the work of others to crafting my own Torley Textures, I've run into all the common pitfalls of managing textures in my inventory. For example, no built-in way to thumbnail preview a swath of textures: you have to open them up one-by-one, eating up full memory for each, which also reduces performance. Also, since we don't have an actual tagging system, you may have something named:

03Brk.jpg

and not have the damndest idea what that is by name! I resort to "ghetto tags", which is usually inserting keywords after a filename such as:

03Brk.jpg [WOOD TREE OLD]

if not altogether renaming the file into something human-readable like:

Old wooden tree bark

Before I jaunt further with ya, let me preface that tFinder doesn't solve tangles with cryptic filenames, but if you've named textures appropriately before including them in the database — send them to Cid for now; in the future this will be more open — then you can find them.

A brief diversion: when I send SL snapshots to Flickr, in the subject or description, I often put keywords I know will make sense to me later, so I can find something straight outta the archives. On so many instances, a fellow Linden or Resi will ask me about something I've seen on my travels, I need to pull it up — fast!

That's certainly why I've adopted a good habit of taking a few moments beforehand to optimize information retrieval later.

And now, the meat of this story is that I IMed Cid, he sent me the tFinder, we met inworld to discuss. tFinder costs L$10, which is the price of uploading a single texture to begin with, and presently banner ad-supported, which some will find intrusive, but for the price it's cheap & cheery, and ah, context: Cid didn't know this would be so popular! Some of the background behind it is that he likes to choose intriguing projects, and he was thinking about P2P networks. In Second Life, which is decidedly very conducive to social activity, what sort of things are easily swapped? We know freebies are, but looking at it on a more granular level, textures are micro-art — my adherent philosophy. And if they sit in your inventory, they're not doing much else unless you apply them, or share them. Sharing textures augments their usage.

tFinder basically works like this: you click a button, type in a word or two (it does substring matches so searching for "col" may turn up "Colorful Mattress"), and it shows you thumbnail previews (shrunken-down versions of the originals, so they don't conserve graphics card memory, but are easier to visualize). Click on one, the full thing pops up, and you can save it to inventory like any standard texture you receive.

I did several casual searches., and was pleased to find Torley Textures in the current database. Cid clued me in that the collection was drawn from available free packs present at places like sandboxes, newcomer-friendly venues, etc. Looking at some of the prefixes appended to my textures such as "AB -", it was apparent they came from Harbinger's Haven. I spotted some dupes, and then proceeded to engage Cid in dialogue with feature suggestions like:

• What about a way to automatically remove dupes?
• How about adding the ability to search by creator name?
• A reskinning contest for the HUD, done by some of the Grid's most talented texturers?
• A community-driven tagging system?
• Top lists of the most popularly-downloaded textures?

Clearly, I'm excited about what already exists in the present. When I last checked, Cid didn't have an inworld place to acquire the tFinder yet, but I got a preview of his new prototype. I mused about distro'ing Torley Textures from a tFinder server in the future. And in the process, began to ruminate about a "texture culture" where swarms of textures, like a collective of insects or a flock of geese, congregate together and are distributed over the fattening texture pipelines of Second Life. Need a wood, metal, glass, etc. texture but are too lazy — or simply efficient — to rummage inworld? Call up the tFinder and see what kind of good times are in store for you.

As I often hark towards (this should be disclaimer text appended to just about all I write, albeit not boring), this is but a seed of what's yet to come. I thrill at experiencing what could be the germination of great growths to go — so now is early in the process when I can see the potential, and share it with you, so that we may mutually benefit.

As part of a flourishing open source texture movement, I encourage more Residents of Second Life to take up their tools and imbue the world with a unique beauty that it didn't know before; textures specially inspired by SL, which didn't exist prior to your knowledge of it, which may find their way to the outside, instead of the other way around. Don't know where to start? Give my fave Filter Forge a 90-day trial. Viva les textures!

Gracious thanx to Cid Vilas for taking the time to demo tFinder for me, and heck, inventing it!

I really feel good about the sharp fizz of green apple soda. Haven't had it in ages. Am drinking cherry right now, and thinking about future projects. After my LOVE set of Torley Textures, there's a logical progression: pink comes green, so I'm announcing ahead of time that the next TT pack will be titled LUSH, as in "lush green grass" or "lush verdant ideas".

While I'm not a comic strip artist (yet), several recurring themes have cropped up on my blog. You may've noticed that in the MythArc category, I regularly run post-processed works of art based on original Second Life screenshot, often accompanied by text portraying a fictional AVR = Alternate Virtual Reality. Or what about the solo piano music I've been sharing? My Video Tutorials are the DIY joy which came out of my own frustrations of not having more vivid learning resources in Second Life. Speaking of SL, inworld exploring's something I like to blog about at least weekly. And of course, related on the seed content front, we have the Torley Textures.

Heck, after dancing for textures, I'm tempted to fuse more of my projects. (All the background music in my vidtuts is by me, which came out of my desire for convenience; since I made it, I don't have to worry about licensing rights. ) Like chemical elements, the aforementioned are modular joints which can be plugged into each other. Particularly with the textures they're rich, full, yet provide a flexible base to work from and make your own lovely stuff. Thus, what's so compelling to me isn't always what I began, but where you take it.

And here you have it.