Saturday, January 27, 2007

Alpha Channel Test Pattern

I needed an alpha channel test image for the book. Chosen Few had a great one, but asked me to find another home for the test pattern. It is used in the book in a short tutorial for creating and learning about alpha channels. Alpha channels in SL, are used to create transparency which is extremely useful. Here is the test pattern:





Here is what it looks like in SL, once you have created an alpha texture using Photoshop, saved as a 32-bit Targa, uploaded into SL, than applied to a default cube:


Sunday, January 14, 2007

Seamless Wood Textures for Second Life


Well, writing a book and a blog at the same time just don't work! It has been a while since I have posted, but had to drop this one in. I encountered a freely downloadable tool from http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/ called Wood Workshop. It allowed me to quickly create this nice tileable wood texture which I quickly uploaded. They also have another product for producing tileable textures that looks pretty cool.
You can see the texture applied to my dock at
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Humuli/209/130/22/