How I texture. Part 1

I have been complemented on the appearance of my shoes. While I make no pretense to call myself an artist, I have found ways to be creative within my limitations. First and foremost, I am a builder, a manipulator of prims. But without the ability to add a realistic texture to an object, it will appear flat and false, rather than alive and authentic. While I strive for realism in the things I make, my comments also apply to builders of cartoonish or fantastical objects.

One of the simplest yet most important things you can do when texturing a complex object, is to make sure that all similar textures are to the same scale. The repeat of a texture varies from cube to sphere to torus, particularly when they are cut or hollowed. With regular patterns e.g. a brick wall, its quite easy to see which faces need to have their textures corrected, re-oriented, stretched or shrunk. but with abstract patterns, sometimes its hard to see if the pattern is even going in the right direction. Rest assured, it will show up down the road, when you wonder why one face looks a little different from all the others.

What I do before I begin texturing an object,is to cover all faces of the object with a simple 10 x 10 grid. The one I use is divided into 100 numbered squares. The numbers enable me to wrap a texture continuously across a series of faces. Confession: I copied this grid from somewhere in Second Life without asking for the owners permission. Bad!


To demonstrate my technique, I'm going to use an example that occurred recently, when I decided that the stairs in my store needed a runner; a carpet that would lead the shopper up the stairs to the next level. I wanted to use an existing oriental carpet texture as the runner, and have it flow seamlessly up the treads and risers, without a break in the pattern.

Step 1. (Pun intended) Since the stairs in question were existing, I had to make the carpet prims fit the size of the tread and rise (the horizontal and vertical parts) of the stair. I began with the middle step and once I had it sized correctly, I duplicated it to create the top and bottom parts.


Step 2. After making all 3 prims transparent, I used the grid texture on the faces of the three prims that would become the carpet: in this case, 3 treads and 2 risers. You will notice that each face displays the full 10 x 10 grid, but depending which way the prim cubes are oriented, the grid may not be oriented in the same direction on each face.


Step 3. Change the Rotation of the appropriate faces so that the grid texture is oriented in the same direction on each face. So far so good. But we don't want to display the full 10 x 10 grid on each face. We want to stretch the grid texture out across the full length of the carpet, so that the proportions of the grid are identical on both the treads and the risers. NB. In this instance, I am not concerned about the width of the carpet. The carpet could be 1m wide or 10m wide.


Step 4. Department of Mathematics. My treads are 1.0m deep (from front to back) and the risers are 0.45m high. The total length of the carpet is 3 treads plus 2 risers or (3 x 1.0) + (2 x 0.45) = 3.9m. If I divide 1 by 3.9, I get 0.256m. Or to put it another way, each tread will be 1.0 x 0.256 of the grid texture and each riser will be 0.45 x 0.256 (0.115) of the grid texture. To check this, 3 treads @ 0.256 (0.77) plus 2 risers @ 0.115 (0.23) equals 1. (Numbers are rounded up for convenience)


Step 5. Click on all 3 tread faces and change the Horizontal Repeats Per Face from 1.000 to 0.256. Next click on the 2 risers and change the Horizontal Repeats Per Face from 1.000 to 0.115. Now all the grid squares are of the same proportions, but the numbering does not flow continuously from end to end.


Step 6. Beginning with the top tread, we want the #1 square of our grid to be at the far end of the prim. By trial and error (there must be a cleverer way to do this, but it works for me) set the Horizontal Offset to 0.630. Leave the middle tread the way it is, and set the bottom tread to 0.370. Change the top riser Horizontal Offset to 0.817 and the bottom riser to 0.187. Hopefully, you will see that the grid numbers now run continuously in the same proportions from top to bottom.


Step 7. Click on all five faces of the stair runner and select the carpet texture. Bingo! A seamless carpet pattern. (Your results may vary).

Coming out of the closet...

Confession is good for the soul, they say. So here goes. I'm not a woman, I just play one in Second Life. Until now. Say goodbye to gorgeous, 30-something, white-haired Epy, and hello to handsome, aging, gray-haired Epo.

Questions arise: why did I use a female AV for so long, and why have I decided to reveal my RL gender. Every day, every minute, everything we do (or don't do) effects our future. Every now and then Fate intervenes and offers us a wild card to play (or not). When I joined SL, I had no idea I would still be here almost two years later. Not because I thought my interest would wane, but because I doubted that Linden Lab would hold up under the pressure of explosive growth. For this reason I never went Premium, preferring to rent rather than purchase land.

But back to the questions. Why did I chose a female AV? Blame it on Lara Croft, heroine of Tomb Raider. This third-person action game was (I believe) the first computer game to have a woman as the principal character. I quickly grew accustomed to watching a female character perform the actions that I controlled. So when I joined SL, and was given the opportunity to select the gender of my AV, I had no hesitation in choosing female. So did a lot of other guys.

And I gotta say, it's been fun. For starters, speaking as a straight guy, I'd rather watch a woman walk ahead of me, than a man. Thank goodness for the sexy walk animation! Suddenly I had a whole new wardrobe to experiment with, and I discovered that I had no difficulty in selecting which lingerie to wear, which shoes went with which outfit, and how I wanted my hair and make-up to look.

But the minute Epy stepped out to explore the world, I experienced male-female relationships from a whole different perspective. Guys would hit on me! "Hey Babe", "Hi Doll". I had become a sex object! So for those early months when she explored SL's most popular activity, she became a lesbian. But all that was before I became consumed with building shoes. But being a woman stuck. Epy made friends as a woman, but when she started exchanging RL information with others, I always felt deceitful. I've confessed my RL identity to a few close friends, but I'm tired of the deception, and that's why I've come out of closet. From now on, Epo will appear as a guy. Get used to it. And all those gorgeous outfits? I've transferred all I could to one of my alts - a gorgeous, white-haired, 30-something woman.

One last thing: I don't want to hear from anyone complaining that I tricked them by appearing as a woman. Get over it. Ain't nobody here looks like their AV; that's the advantage of this place: we can and should be anyone we want.

What's in a name?

In the beginning was the word; and the word was Jeepers Creepers.

When I arrived in Second Life in November '05, I spent most of my time in the sandboxes, learning how to build. I've always considered myself an artisan rather than an artist, and SL provided a place where I could build anything I could imagine. Every now and then I would venture out into the world and find a camping chair to earn some money for clothes and especially shoes. Although my first AV was female, I quickly realized that it was the shortage of good men's shoes that would provide the inspiration for my first commercial venture.

The first shoe I built to sell, was a black crepe-soled creeper. It has a simple design that offered plenty of opportunity for variations: different colors, buckles, laces, faux-fur tops, emblems on the toe and heel, etc. The obvious name for the shoe appeared out of nowhere: Jeepers Creepers. That name appeared first as a logo on the label inside the shoe (which is why there is a row of stitches around the perimeter), and also on the lid of the shoebox. That selfsame Jeepers Creepers logo also appeared above my first and all my subsequent stores, up until today, when my store logo became the far more prosaic JCS, Jeepers Creepers Shoes, with the separate Men's Store version shown below.

I'm glad that I've finally made the change. There was some confusion, at least in my mind, that Jeepers Creepers was both the name of my store and the name of one of the many brands of shoes that I sell. Also, I always felt that the original logo was somewhat cartoonish, and while that was not inappropriate for the shoes it adorned, when it appeared above my store, as the name of my store, it did not reflect the quality and variety of the shoes I make.

For anyone who's interested, I chose Bookman Old Style as the font for the JCS, because it has a shapely clean look and a very strong J. In homage to my original Jeepers Creepers logo, I chose yellow as the font color (although in a richer and less garish shade), and a modest bevel and emboss to lift the letters off the black background. Initially there was slightly too much space between the J and the C, so I switched the letter spacing from the default Metric to Optical. The other font is the honest Arial. I kept the same enhancements for the MEN's, but for the Jeepers Creepers Shoes, I chose instead an Inner Shadow which has the effect of making the letters appear to be incised from the background, reflecting their diminished importance.