Create a Custom Texture for Bought Mesh

 

Mesh! What a wonderful and beautiful thing to have! How much detail, how many faces, shadows and SO realistic! We all want it, don't we? And we all want to offer mesh to our customers, but not all of us can make it. 

So what are we doing? We buy nice mesh things full perm and then.... we get a folder with TONS of stuff: the actual mesh object(s) plus an incredible amount of different textures. But what are we supposed to do with them??

In this tutorial, I want to show you how you can make a custom texture for the mesh you bought with the help of the AO- or Shadowmap that usually comes with the mesh.

We will use Gimp for this tutorial. It's a free pixel-based picture editor and just as powerful as other programs you have to pay for. You can download the actual version here: Gimp Download
In this tutorial, I use version 2.10.32. It might be slightly different if you use another version - but the main steps should be the same.

In our example, we will use the AO-map of a table cloth I made myself.

I usually don't like alpha maps.  Even if none of the transparent parts show on the mesh, SL will still treat them as transparent and so they get caught by the SL alpha bug.  This can seriously mess up the looks of the finished product. So we're forced to set the alpha mode inworld to "Alpha masking"  (which I personally don't like much as it makes the  texture a bit blurry) or Alpha mode "None" - but less experienced builders often don't know that. So if we don't need alpha, it's best to not have any transparent parts in the texture at all right from the start.

However, some creators still leave their their textures transparent, even if it's not needed. So I have created an alpha AO map, to show you how to turn it into a professional custom mesh texture.
If your texture has black parts instead of transparent parts, be happy and skip step 1. 

Sooo, let's get to it, shall we? 😉
Then  take a deep breath and open your AO- or Shadowmap in Gimp.

 

 

Step 1: Turning our alpha-texture into an opaque texture

 

Create a new layer.

Select black as foreground color.

Go to "Edit" and select "Fill with FG color". 

 

Whoa, our whole picture turns black?! Yes. 

Don't panic, all is well. We just have the black layer on top of our layerstack, so that's the one showing. 

Click the orange arrow pointing downwards to move it down. Now it looks right. 😊 

 

Now select the top layer (the AO map) and click on the "stack-with-arrow"- icon. This will merge the 2 layers. 

Please note that Gimp only merges layers from top to bottom, so you will have to select the upper layer first to be able to merge it to the next lower one of the layer stack.

 

Now we have a proper opaque AO map to start with. So far so good. 😉

 

Step 2: Extracting the Shadows

 

Well, we want to use the shadows of the AO-/Shadow map. But we want to have only the shadows, ideally on our own beautiful textures. So what we have to do next is to extract the shadows on a transparent background, discarding the white. 

Thankfully, Gimp has an easy solution for us: It has a literal button to turn a color into transparency- Naturally, this works best on clean RGB color channels (pure red, pure green, pure blue) or black and white. Good we're dealing with white today, this will make it easy.

 

Go to "Layer" on the top menu and select "Transparency", then select "Color to Alpha". 

In the window that pops up, pick the color you want to turn transparent. It should default to white, but if it doesn't, just click into the color box and select white. 

Click "ok" to confirm. 

 

Our picture should now look like this: 

 

Now, we're ready to play with all our wonderful fabric textures and apply them to the tablecloth.  👍😁

 

 

Step 3: Adding Fabric

 

Well, what we need now is a nice fabric texture we want to have on our tablecloth. 

For my example, I used a fabric texture made by Polina/virin000 on pixabay. 

This texture is not seamless but for this project, we don't really need it seamless. If you want a finer structure on it, you can use a seamless texture and tile it several times before you go on.

 

Now we need our cloth image as a new layer in our image. We can do this directly by opening it as layer. 

Go to "File" on the top menu, then to "Open as layers..." Load your cloth image. 

It will come up as a new layer into our image. The layer might not have the right size yet and can even stick out of the image. No worries, we're going to fix this in a moment. 

 

 

Go over to the layer stack menu and make sure you have the Cloth layer selected (the top one). Click on the orange "Down"-arrow below the layer stack to move the layer down 1 spot. Alternatively, you can just click on the layer in the layer stack and drag it down. 

Now, we should have something that looks like this: 

We can see the cloth texture and - admittedly rather faint - the shadows of the shadowmap. 

Our next step now will be to enhance the shadows until we like them. 

 

 

Step 4: Enhancing the Shadows

Enhancing the shadows is pretty much the easiest step of all and done in a second. All we need to do is to copy the shadow layer for a few times. 

Select the shadow layer by clicking on it. Then go to the layer stack menu and find the copy icon. This is the icon with the 2 squares. 

Click it a few times and see how the shadows become deeper. Stop when you like it.  

Note: 

Depending on your shadowmap, it can need quite a few copies until the shadows seem deep enough. In this case, the shadows are pretty deep already, so I kept it at 3 copies of the layer.  

But there are some textures where the shadows are rather faint, so you have to make quite some copies to get them to look good. 

I recommend to export often and test them locally on your model to see how they look inworld before you finally upload them. 

 

 

Now the only thing that's left is to export your new texture into a format you can upload to Second Life. As long as your texture doesn't need an alpha channel and you don't have extremely detailed textures, I would recommend to use the jpg - format. Yes, it might lose some detail (though it often hardly makes any difference, really) but you can be sure that no hidden alpha channel creates trouble later. 

If it needs the alpha channel (e.g. if it has any visible parts that should be transparent), make it a png - file. 

That's it for today! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and feel all inspired to make a ton of custom textures for all the mesh you have bought so far. Hehe, Happy Gimping! 😁

As usual, please let me know what you think in the comments. I would really like to hear your experiences with making your own custom textures. Have a wonderful day and see you soon.!

 

Best wishes,

Wolf Song

10 Essential Building Habits that make your Second Life easier!

Hello Fellow Builders!

I know it's been a while and much has happened - in fact, I had this entry sitting in my drafts for more than a year. Omg! But now I got it done and I can finally share it with you!  💪

 

During all the building I did, I have developed certain habits that helped me in my workflow. Some of them, I learned from other builders, others just came naturally with the process. But what all of them have in common is that they make your life as a builder so much easier. So just in case you might not know them, I list them here for you. 

And without further ado, let's dive into it!

 

1. Name your prims

Do you also just start building when you have an idea?
Ikr, it's so easy: something pops into your mind, you build it, texture it, link it and script it and then you pick it up without a second thought.
Then you want to rezz it, or pass it on to someone, and you look into your objects folder and there it is: "Objects" all over the place! But which one of them now is your carefully crafted build?

You can easily avoid this by naming your prims right from the start. When you rezz your first prim, give it the name of your project. It doesn't really matter which name you pick, as long as you can associate it with your current build.

When your project gets bigger and more complicated, try and name prims similarly which belong together.
For example, if you build a cave with plants and waterfalls, you could name the waterfalls "Waterfall 1 - top layer", Waterfall 1 - bottom layer", the plants "Plant 1 - inside", "Plant 2 - inside", Plant 1 - outside" and the cave prims "Cave - Roof", "Cave - Wall 1" and so on.
These are just examples, of course. Name your prims however you want, but do name them.

This way, you have a much better overview and you will have it a lot easier to find the right prims when scrolling through a linkset.

When you're done with your project and everything is linked and saved, you still can rename your build to the name you want to give your finished project. 

 

2. Always have a spare prim to shift-copy

Those who have attended my classes know that I often start a class with: 

"Rezz a prim and shift-copy it up along the blue arrow.  Name the upper copy 'Next Prim'."

Then I continue with the lower prim and start the build. The "Next Prim" stays above the build and gets shift-copied down until we don't need any more prims.

Now why am I doing this?
The answer is very easy: I keep a spare prim right in the center of the build.
Whenever I need a new prim, I have it right there and it's already adjusted perfectly in case you need a centered prim. I can also already give a property, for example set it to the Physics Shape Type "Convex Hull" in case I build a mixed linkset with mesh pieces.

3. Create an own folder for your project

Especially when it's going to be a bigger project, you want to have all your assets in a special project folder. Create subfolders for textures, sculpts, mesh objects, scripts and so on. Copy the stuff you need into them, so you have everything right at hand and don't have to search your inventory all the time.

When you develop your project, you probably have a certain style or texture scheme for your entire project. Just imagine you'd have to dive into the depth of your inventory 20 times for this special texture whenever you make a new prim...  you will be happy to have all things in one place, it will save you so much time.

After your project is done, you can either delete all the subfolders or pack them up in boxes if you want to keep things together. This way, you keep everything organized and save your inventory from flowing over.

 Oh, and you can of course nest boxes, too. 👍

 

 

 

4. Log your progress

During your building process, you might want to save things before making major changes.The easiest way to do this is to just take a copy of the build (or the script) into your inventory.
The disadvantage is, of course, that in time, several versions of the project will pile up in your inventory and you might soon lose the overview of which one is what.

 To avoid that, you can either name them differently, like "Cave", "Cave with Water", "Cave with water & Plants" - or your give them version numbers, like "Cave 1.0", "Cave 1.1", "Cave 1.3".
If you make a major change, just change your version number to "Cave 2.0" and go from there.

This way, you will always have a full development log in your inventory and can easily go back to a previous step without having to search for ages. When your build is done, you can either delete previous versions and only keep the last one (if you're sure you won't be needing them anymore) or you can box them up to save room in your inventory.

Honestly, for me, as soon as I have deleted that previous version I was so sure of that I'll never need it again, I end up rebuilding it, because I find something I still have to fix or change. So yes, I keep all the versions - no matter how many they are - until I'm done with the build.

5. Restore to Last Position

So when we have to re-rezz to fix stuff, our viewer gives us a great option: Restore to Last Position!

Whenever you pick up a prim, it's last position in the world gets stored and if you are somewhat close to the last position the prim had (same sim, same parcel), this will bring it back to the spot where it was before. 

This works for a single object as well as for linked or soft-linked objects.

 

There is one downside to it though: it only works if the parcel you're in includes the <0,0,0> coordinate of the sim. When you build on a big sandbox, it's usually no problem as they mostly have the entire sim dedicated to the sandbox, so the 0-spot is included.  

When you're on private land, like your own parcel, and you don't have rezz rights on that spot, this trick might not help you. In that case, I recommend to put things into a rezzer as soon as possible, especially when you know it's going to be a bigger project. 

You can still easily exchange the linksets in the rezzer, just pick them up and replace them in the box. If you don't change the root prim during the building process, you don't even have to record the position again.

6. Log your Rezzer's Channel Numbers 

Talking about rezzers... whenever you make a new project using a rezzer, you want to create a new channel number for each of your projects.  After having done that a few times - at least if you are as disorganized as I am - you'll soon hit the point where you stand there and wonder if you have used this channel number already or not. 

 

 

So, the easiest thing you can do is to keep a notecard where you log all the channel numbers that you used and what builds you used them for. I keep this notecard in the folder with my rezzer system and update it as soon as I use it for a new build. Easy-peasy.

 

 

 

 

 

7. Seat your avatar

Does this happen to you too? You move your camera around your build and try to come close to a certain point and - wham! Your avatar makes a movement - possibly with the AO still on - and runs right into your view. Or you select another prim in edit mode and the avi turns into it's direction, waving it's fancy flexi hair all over your screen. Well, in one or another way, we all know this problem, right?

So yes, we want to restrain our avatars when we're building. Tie them down! No more dancing around in our sandbox, no more walking into our screens, no more avatar footprints in our fresh concrete! NO SIR!

And guess what? All we need is a simple wooden box. No scripts, no animations, no fancy textures, no mesh. Nothing is required other than a simple SL default prim. Rezz the prim, right click on it and sit. Problem solved. And the best thing of it? If your avi then still is in the way, you don't even need to go out of edit mode. You just select the box and move it out of the way, with avi and everything. 

Of course, as builders, we might feel that a simple box isn't enough. Yes, go for it. Create that fancy building seat you always wanted to have. Make a throne. A great villain chair. Or a hammock. A carpet with a waterpipe. Whatever suits you. As long as your avatar can sit on it, it's perfect! 

 

 

8. Use your camera

Now as we have our avatar seated: Learn to use your camera. We can't walk around our build to see it from all sides (and we don't want to either!). Instead, we want to use our camera independently to see our build from all sides, quickly zoom in and out, orbit around it and so on. 

Nothing does that easier for us than our keyboard camera controls. Essentially, this is the ALT-key and the left mouse button. Hold them both down and move the mouse... you'll soon get the hang of it. 😎 

What, you think there's more to it than just that? Ok, well, yes, there is - a little, maybe.  I'm going to make a tutorial for this soon. In the meantime, here you find the official description of the SL camera controls. 

9. Use your keyboard shortcuts

We all know CTRL+Z to undo the last step. It's one of the mightiest spells in the book and it works almost everywhere. How often do we wish we would have this in RL!

But beyond this, there are so many other shortcuts you probably didn't know. For example, did you know that CTRL+Y would re-do the last step you just undid? I didn't. I actually only very recently learned this.

I admit, when you're very used to working with your mouse, you might feel a bit uncomfortable using keyboard shortcuts. But I promise, you'll get used to them very quickly and they will really enhance your workflow.

I personally tend to move, rotate and scale things into place freely, using the move, scale and rotate tool. I used to go with the mouse all over to the edit window to select the tool I want. It took time, I had to refocus from the build to the edit window and I had to move the mouse away from the pivoting point of my camera. Now, I keep staying in "move" mode and just press CTRL for the rotate tool and CTRL+SHIFT for the scale tool. No need to move the mouse, no need to refocus, no need to break my workflow. It really saves me so much time!

Here's the official list of keyboard shortcuts for the SL viewer.  They also should be seen as hovertips or directly incorporated in your edit window, so you can take them from there, too.

 

10. Remove your scripts

 

Oh how beautiful is the virtual world with scripts. They enhance almost everything. As soon as things move, squeak or bling, they become so much more vivid. That's why we love scripting our stuff. 

 

But did you know that many scripts which cause steady effects on prims can be totally removed without losing the effect? 

Yes, it's true. Many effects, such as sound loops, particles, prim rotations with llTargetOmega, texture animations and several others become prim property when they start and will stick with the object. 

 

Removing such scripts can reduce the script load of a sim significantly. Even if there are only a few removable scripts in your build, every little bit helps. So when you're done with your build, take your time to go over it and remove all unnecessary scripts out of your prims before you pack it up for sale.

 

 

 Well, that's it for today. I hope this list is somewhat helpful and you feel inspired to try some things out. As usual, let me know what you think in the comments and I always love to hear about your current building projects. Have a wonderful time and see you again soon!

Wolf Song

 

Linking prims to mesh? No Problem! - A Guide to mixed Linksets

One of the most notorious myths in Second Life is that you can't link prims and sculpties to mesh objects. It will shoot your Land Impact through the roof and might even crash the sim you're on. 

Well, I do this all the time. 

 

Um, NO, I'm NOT crashing any sims (or at least not so far...)! But I do mixed linksets a lot. In fact, there is hardly any build I make that doesn't contain mesh parts and I still love sculpties, they simply do have their purpose, even in times of mesh.  And I tend to always link as much as I can - it's so much nicer if you have only 1 object to handle instead of several. Even if you put them in a rezzer, the less elements you have in there, the more likely it is to rezz properly. 

 

Of course, like in every myth, there is some truth in it: 

When you link prims and sculpts to mesh objects, there is always the chance to have one or another prim or sculpty that doesn't behave well in the linkset and makes the LI go up higher than expected. But in most cases, this can be avoided by following a few simple rules when linking your mixed build.

 

Example:

This beautiful antique bookstand that we make in the Spell Book Class consists of  5 single elements: the table, the bookstand, the book, the candle and the wick. 

 

So in this build, we have 2 sculpted prims, 2 regular prims and 1 mesh object. 

All 5 objects are linked and together, they add up to an LI of 4. 

So yes, it's perfectly possible. And I would like to encourage you to experiment with it. It is often a big benefit to pick your building tools like a surgeon would pick their instruments. Every tool serves their purpose, none is "better" than the other one. Mesh is great but sometimes, a prim is better, depending on what you 're building. Sometimes a sculpty is the best choice you can make. I promise, we will look at these differences in an extra article soon. 😁

 

By the way, these rules also apply whenever you want to use ALM materials in your prim or sculpty builds. ALM materials (normal and specular textures) can significantly higher your LI when used on prims or sculpts. Like, a simple prim sphere with ALM material textures can end up with 800 LI or more (YES, I know how it sounds but it's TRUE! Check it out here!). 

Now, let's jump right into it and see what we need to know when we want to mix our prims.

Rule #1: Set your prims to Convex Hull

This is the first and foremost rule when you make a mixed linkset: ALWAYS set all prims to Physics Shape Type "Convex Hull" when you plan to link them to mesh.

To do this, select your prim, go to Features Tab and pick "Convex Hull" from the Physics Shape Type menu. 

 

This is absolutely necessary as mixed linksets can really mess up your LI when fortune does not favor you. 

By doing that, you can also already see if your LI is turning out to be a problem. It will show as soon as you have set the Physics Shape Type, so you will already get a clue if it works out or not. 

 

Caveats:

There is one downside of the "Convex Hull" trick though: 

As it will cause SL to use simplified physics, it also will ignore  all holes and hollowed shapes. You probably know this from sculpties: Even if they look as if you could walk through, their physics are one big block, so you have to set them to phantom to be able to use holes that are in it. 

This problem only affects regular prims though. Sculpties ignore all holes anyway, and mesh objects usually ignore holes, too - unless the creator cared to make custom physics for them. The good mesh creators do that when it makes sense - but the vast majority doesn't. 

 

Rule #2: Pick a very simple object as your root prim

Always try and pick either a mesh part or a very simple prim (like a box) as the root prim.

If the mesh part is not made by you, you want to take one of your prims, so it shows your name as the creator of the build. Boxes and cylinders are the simplest prims you can add (boxes are still better than cylinders though).

 

If you have the permission to upload mesh to Second Life (you need to go through an approval process on the  Second Life website), you can also create a simple mesh object for yourself with your name as the creator. In another article, I show you how to make a mesh cube for Second Life with nothing more than your viewer. 

First Troubleshooting:

If you have a very complicated prim, like a heavily tortured torus or a very detailed or big sculpt, it might shoot up your LI even though it's set to "Convex Hull". You usually see that right away on the LI of the object in the edit window - but sometimes, the actual LI needs a bit to update. Peek at the free LI on the land when you change it, this often updates much faster and will give you a direct clue if your LI goes up, down or stays the same.

If you have this troublemaker as a child prim, you can try and set it's physics shape type to "NONE" - that often fixes the problem. 

BUT...
Physics shape type NONE only works on child prims. You can not set the root prim to have no shape. If you try, you will get an error message. It's no big deal though, the rest of the build will still change to Physics Shape Type "None". Just the root prim will stay what is was before. And yes, it will stay whatever it was before, so if it was Physics Shape Type "Prim", it will still be "Prim" and this can potentially cause trouble. 

 

So this is why we want to have a prim with simple physics as the root prim: it won't cause any problems when set to "Convex Hull" and it most likely doesn't affect the linkset too much, even if we don't pay attention and have it set to "Prim". 

Note:

Physics Shape Type "None" also sets the prim to "Phantom".
This is a nice and easy way to set single objects to Phantom in a non-Phantom linkset but it only works if it doesn't mess up your LI.

Sometimes, we want to have "holes" in our builds, e.g. for doors, hallways, etc. 

Holes in prims or mesh are ignored with the simplified physics of "Convex Hull". If we want the object's physics to behave like the object looks, we have to set it to Physics Shape Type "Prim". This can cause serious trouble though, especially if we use complicated prims or ALM materials, so we'll have to be really careful with it.

Sculpted prims will always ignore holes, no matter what. If we have hollow sculpties in our linkset, we will have to make them "Phantom" in one or another way to be able to walk through them.  

In former times, there used to be scripts with a phantom hack, that allowed us to make single prims phantom within a linkset. There still are some that work, but it's often wonky and it requires a script in every prim (though the can be removed without changing the effect - but when you change the linkset, this might break.). 

Physics Shape Type "None" does exactly this thing for us. Of course, we will need objects that defines the physics then or we could just walk through the walls or fall through the floor.

Now... what if our LI is still too high?

 

1.) Search your linkset for another troublemaker - probably there is another prim that you didn't expect to cause high LI.
If in doubt, just set the whole linkset (except for the root prim) to Physics Shape Type NONE and see what happens to your LI.

2.) Check the mesh you use. Some mesh is really badly created or is uploaded with too high LoD settings, so it has a very high LI by itself. Unfortunately, there is no way to fix bad mesh inworld.

3.) Check the scale of your build. The bigger the mesh, the higher the LI and sometimes, it just needs to be a little bit smaller to lower the LI significantly (especially if the LoD of the mesh is very high!).

4.) If the LI is just a little bit higher as you would like it, you can always try to add a few more simple prims or mesh parts, like a few decorations more or something simple that enhances your build. Sometimes, the LI just rounds up and you can add quite a few more prims and still keep the LI.
Just experiment... ;)

5.) If everything fails....
Well, there are cases where there is no further option than to leave things unlinked. In this case, make 1 linkset for all mesh objects and another linkset for prims and sculpties. If you need things to be partially phantom, make a 3rd linkset for all phantom objects. You can then use a rezzer system (like Builders Buddy, for example) to make it easy to rezz your build or keep the linksets soft-linked.

 

 

 

Ok, that was it for today. I hope this helped a bit to demystify mixed linksets. 

I really want to encourage you to experiment with mixed linksets as all SL objects have their purpose and there's no reason to drop helpful tools form your toolbox only because they appear outdated or complicated. 

Please tell me about your experiences in the comments  and also let me know if you have further questions or have some more additional information about it. I would really like to know what you think. 

Have a wonderful day and I'm looking forward to hear from you,

Wolf Song

Creating a Pearl Effect with ALM Materials

 

Oh yes, we all love the lighting possibilities ALM (Advanced Lighting Model) offers to us. Just think about the beautiful shine light creates on surfaces, especially combined with detailed bump and specular maps. Or the stunning effects you can create with the projecting feature. It's just plain awesome and super fun to play with!

 

But did you know that it is even possible to create a realistic Mother-Of-Pearl effect with ALM?  

 

I actually found out about it by accident when I was too lazy to make a specular texture and just used the diffuse texture that was almost, but not quite, grayscale. On the surface of the model, which I had colored so dark that is was almost black, suddenly all those faint colors of the texture appeared in the soft shine of the model. And yes, I was stunned!

 

Of course I had to test the effect if it was really working or just the result of my imagination and ... wow, yes, it did work, and it worked greatly. And of course, the next thing I did was turning this new and exciting feature I had just learned about into a class.

That's how the "Pearl in a Shell"- class was born and this is the build we make during class:

No worries, I won't run you through the whole class now. If you want to make the fancy build, you can always join me inworld for it, right? Here, we will just go over the light effect and work ourselves into a bit more detail than we could in class. 

 

I. Preparations

 

First of all, we will need a prim. 

It doesn't matter much what prim we use, the effect will work on all surfaces. I personally prefer rounded shapes to emphasize the shine depending on the angle of the incoming light. 

Caution:

Please take into consideration that all prims  and sculpts with ALM materials are treated like mesh in Second Life and should be set to Physics Shape Type "Convex Hull" in the Features Tab of your edit window. If you don't do that, you can easily get a very high LI (Land Impact). 

In fact, when I developed the class build above, I forgot it at some point and ended up with 871 (!) LI. 

Yes, 871. Eighthundredseventyone. On a build with 3 prims. Ouch!

 

What, you don't believe me? 

Here's the proof:

I think we can agree that we don't want this. So whatever prim you use, please make sure it is set to Physics Shape Type "Convex Hull" in Features Tab. 😉

 

So for now, I will use a simple sphere and set the Physics Shape Type to "Convex Hull". 

 

Secondly, we will need a Pearl texture. 

Well, basically, we can use ANY texture for the effect, but as it's sort of an iridescent effect you find on pearls, we'll just use a simple mother-of-pearl texture here. 

The one below, I created from a picture of a seashell that was originally made by Illuvis on pixabay. Feel free to download it from here and use it for your own projects if you like.

 

 

Last but not least, we need to have ALM (Advanced Lighting Model) enabled in our viewer. 

By default, it is disabled in most viewers, so you might have to switch it on. In Firestorm viewer, you find it in Preferences > Graphics > General. It's a checkbox under "Shaders". 

Make sure to press "OK" before you close the window to save the setting. 

 

If you have an older system, it might impact your performance, so you probably don't want to leave it on all the time. If your system can take it, it is well worth leaving it on. Many builders use it to enhance their builds and some effects will be totally invisible without it. 

To be honest, since I first switched it on, it never went off again as it adds so much to the overall Second Life experience. 

 

II. Creating the effect 

 

Ok, we have a prim, a pearl texture and ALM enabled. We're ready to go!

 

Select your prim and open the Texture tab. 

All the settings we need for this effect will be in texture tab. Size and shape of the prim or mesh piece don't matter at all. 

 

1.) Texture (diffuse)

For "Texture (diffuse)", we select a plain white texture.  

This texture is accessible directly in most viewers. Just click into the little texture box on the left side of texture tab and select "blank".  Press "Ok" to confirm. 

If you don't have this feature in your viewer, you can use any other plain texture you have in your inventory. If you color the pearl black, you can even use any other texture you want, it won't harm the effect at all. 

Color:

Color the prim in a dark color. Black will give best results but a dark grey will also give a fine effect. 

The darker your color, the more distinct the effect will turn out. 

Though you will get best results out of black or grey, but please also play with other colors to see the potential and limits of the effect. 

Here, you find a few examples how it looks on different colors: 

 

2.) Bumpiness (normal)

To create this effect, we wouldn't really need to use bumpiness at all. It does make a difference in some settings but it's not so very significant, so feel free to skip it if you like. 

If you want to use bumpiness, you will get best results when you use a blank bump map, like we did for the diffuse texture above. 

Check the checkbox "Bumpiness (normal)" in Texture tab of your viewer. 

Click into the grey texture box and select "blank" from the window that pops up. 

 

If you don't have the blank option in your viewer, just leave the bumpiness on "None".

The pearl effect will be just as beautiful, not worries. 

3.) Shininess (Specular) 

The Shininess and texture we use as a specular map will be the essential key to the whole effect. 

You might have used texture sets before which include different textures for Texture (diffuse), Bumpiness (normal) and Shininess (specular). While bump maps are usually blue with greenish/brownish/pinkish structures, specular maps seem to be just a monochrome grayscale version of the diffuse texture. As a matter of fact, those specular maps are not much more than a map that tells the surface where to be more shiny (bright parts) and where to be less shiny (dark parts).

But Shininess can do so much more:

If you use a colored specular map, like we're about to do, you will see that the map does not only show higher and lower shine but also includes the colors that are embedded in the specular map. This behavior is the base for our pearl effect. 

Check the checkbox "Shininess (specular)". 

Find your pearl texture in your inventory and drag it over into the grey texture box under "Shininess (specular)". Alternatively, your can click into the box and select the texture from your inventory there. 

 

Shininess Settings: 

The settings of Glossiness and Environment will affect how your effect looks in the final outcome. 

Depending on which effect you want to create, I recommend the following values: 

 

Glossiness:

Higher glossiness values will cause a smaller and sharper area to display the shininess at a time, while lower values will make the effect appear on a wider area but also appear more dull. 

Good glossiness values are between 30 and 70 but can go higher on flat surfaces. 

 

Environment:

Higher environment values will give the prim a stronger overall reflectance while cutting the colorful shine a bit down. Lower environment values will make the object appear more silky and give the color effect more room. 

Good environment values are between 10 and 20 but again can go much higher on flat surfaces. 

 

III. Enhancing the effect

 

All ALM effects depend - of course - on 1 factor: Light!

At the moment, our effect might not look very spectacular as it only uses the SL "sunlight" which usually doesn't give the best of result, coming to prims. On flat surfaces, it can happen that we don't see any change at all but just a black boring surface. 

To further enhance our effect and make it as stunning as possible, we can add further light sources. 

Just 1 single light prim makes a big change and if another prim wouldn't really fit into our design concept, we can just make it invisible. The emanated light will not be effected by color or shape of the prim. 

So let's add a light prim to our pearl: 

Rezz a new prim and set it to Physics Shape Type "Convex Hull" in Features tab. 

As you might want to link it to the build at some point, this is important in order not to mess up your LI. 

Still in Features tab, check the "Light"-checkbox. 

You can leave all other values at default, it's fine as it is. Adding color to the light would tint the whole effect in the color of the light. It might look good on some effects but can also take away from the specular texture you used.

 

When you now move the light box around, the shine effect will move with it, according to it's angle to the light prim. It will also change when the camera or avatar moves around it and changes it's angle of sight towards the light and the pearl. 

 

With the new light source, you can also see the differences between the Shininess settings a lot better and pick the perfect setting for your effect. 

 

I hope you enjoyed  this article and it inspired you to play a bit with Advanced Lighting Model effects and the use of Material Textures in Second Life. Let me know what you think in the comments, I'd love to hear about your experiences and projects. 

 

Have a great time and see you soon,

Wolf Song