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?