Torley Textures V: it's arrived! Alive!
Posted on: January 20, 2007… and sooner than I expected, too. By now you prolly know the story: Torley loves handcrafting textures and giving them to you for free. In Second Life @ my office in the Linden Village, I've even got a dispenser to dole out the kit 'n' kaboodle to you:
CLICK TO VISIT! YAYZERAMA!!!!
So let me show you:
Doing these is like releasing rock albums: each time, I'm intent on maintaining a recognizable style, while at the same time developing new flavors of awesome. The last excursion (IV) saw some venturing into glitch art, and this time 'round, I've pounced into futher organicity: taking photos from the analogue realm and muxing them with the painterly tones you know me for.
Continuing a tradition, ArtRage 2 has continued to be such a boon in the process of my creation, and I've explored a smattering of ways to give depth to my details. I've also played with photographic filters: even a subtle shifting of hues can dramatically affect the emotion a given texture conveys. There's a strong visual correlation between the techniques I apply to the SL2086 project and these textures.
And while some of these are overly eccentric, I hope you'll agree with me that as a collection created over the last week in my spare time, they're eclectic, useful, and perhaps VI can't be far behind.
Of special note are the 5 "Add2Shiny" textures: in Second Life, I often see shiny used without a texture, often because it's easy to do. But it looks very flat, because metals often have a special grain all their own, like brushed aluminum or speckled steel. I especially discovered this after modding my MELON-MECHA, since the original's so great but looks flat without textures; thus, I added one of my own.
I was also thinking of doing a range of "DeSats" which could easily be tinted to any tone, but am not sure yet how useful these would be. Seeing as how TT V raises the total Torley Textures package to 211, the future could use some categorization, esp. with the abstract names I'm using (some of these are very hard to describe literally!). So, a plausible notion's that I'll make more focused theme packs… it's a possibility.
And as I've mentioned before:
Use Torley Textures as you please. Remix, reimagine, saturate, antiquate, lucidify, transmogrify, etc. They’re FULLY-permissive so your imagination might know better than mine. There’s no real condition, nor strings attached (those dancing marionettes drive me crazy!), but if you’d like to let me know what you made with Torley Textures, please do.
Enjoy!
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January 20th, 2007 at 5:20 PM PST
Torley, Danielle and I just stopped by Watermelinden Land to pick up the new texture sets…some of them in there (looks like the new ones) showed up in my inventory as no-copy no-mod. I'm assuming this was unintentional…just thought I'd give you a heads-up.
January 20th, 2007 at 5:25 PM PST
Oh DANGIT! MY MISTAKE!
I've got to fix that tonite. Thanx Erbo and Dani!!!!
January 20th, 2007 at 6:03 PM PST
Texture perms should now be fixed, let me know if any more probs!
January 28th, 2007 at 10:47 PM PST
Hi Torley! Nice work!
I decided to try my own hand at Lickably Seamless this weekend.
These are all Second Life snapshots run through GIMP filters. (If some look familiar, it's 'cause I was wearing clothing from the Rainbow Connection Torley Collection while taking the snapshots.)
January 29th, 2007 at 7:39 PM PST
Rainbow! Hihi! You just answered a question of mine: someone on Lifehacker mentioned to me that GIMP could do edge blending for textures; now I know what it looks like via textures you made!
I like the names you've given these too. They're suitably colorful! "WatermellavaLamp" is a treat for my eyez.
I wonder what sorts of clothes you could create from these in turn?
(Like a recursive mirror-in-mirror, since you're wearing the Rainbow Connection Torley Collection clothes.)
Ahhhh a part of our texture heritage!
January 29th, 2007 at 9:32 PM PST
Yes, the GIMP's "make seamless" filter produces images with a distinctive "look" to them. On some images, I think it produces a cool effect. Others just scream "ooh! you GIMPed 'make seamless' to make me!"
When I need seamless without that 4-corner-offset-and-blend look, I use multiple passes through PhotoShop's offset filter, painting/pasting over the old edge, then shifting again and repeating, as in these images. Much more time-consuming, but it allows for different looks.
Would you be willing to share some of your seam-hiding tools and methods?
January 30th, 2007 at 5:31 PM PST
Rainbow, I've never actually used Photoshop's Offset before several days ago, where I saw it used in a tutorial video for making seamless textures. I'm rabid about learning new techniques.
Simply, there are two essential pillars to my texture creation. As described on my wiki page:
* ArtRage 2 - Simple, superb, sexy. It's a painting program with a snazzy user interface and minimal controls. Nope, it doesn't even have Copy OR Paste, but the brush tones are lush. Has a FREE version, but the paid upgrade is only US$19.95… and did I mention the glitter tool adds so much amazing depth? I can almost feel the grains get layered down when working with it.
* PhotoSEAM - Helps you make textures seamless like a superstar! Often, after sketching raw 768×768 chunks in ArtRage 2, I'll bring 'em into PhotoSEAM to master as 512×512s, with some buffer 'round the edges so I can cross borders smoothly. What's more, you can apply touch-up effects to come up with some radical variants of your source material. Caveats: it hasn't been updated in 6+ years and it's prone to crashing, but it's the best I've found thus far!
I found it's essential to have a good graphics tablet for drawing natural strokes and blending seam. Much more elegant than using a mouse, which feels like a brick!
February 1st, 2007 at 3:52 PM PST
Thanks for sharing Torley! I will check out both ArtRage 2 and PhotoSEAM.
Agree totally about the mouse. Sadly, it's all I have at present — that, and dreams of a rockin' pressure sensitive tablet. Maybe one day…
February 3rd, 2007 at 10:42 AM PST
You're super-welcome, Rainbow. I'd also recommend Filter Forge, I posted on Clipmarks about it recently. MAKE YOUR OWN FILTERS!