Arriving at a suitable vine texture was proving difficult, as it is hard to separate a single vine from the others in the row, and to do so from a camera angle that allows it to mapped on the vine row prims.

Thankfully, Matt at Metaversatility has come to the rescue, isolating a single vine growing in a hothouse. The texture was applied to a sample object, which I was then able to further composite in Photoshop to allow multiple vines to appear on a 10m wide prim as well as the crossing prims that provide the vines with depth vis a vis the ‘Charlie Brown Christmas Tree’ One or two additional ‘remixes’ of the composited texture will also be created in an effort to mitigate obvious repitition.

A challenge in the preparation of any texture that utilizes an alpha channel for transparency is the ‘halo’ of edge pixels that usually appear as a result of antialiasing with the original background. I originally learned of the means to eliminate this from a helpful video tutorial posted by Robin Wood (and since compiled with a series of additional tutorials and building resources on the recently launched SL Foundations Wiki). The secret is to create blurred copies of the image that bleed past the edges of the defined alpha channel. Hence the ‘fuzzy edges’ in the image you see above.