Texturing in Second Life is quite intuitive relative to a number of offline 3D modeling packages that I’ve had experience with, but that doesn’t mean it is any easier to get the materials to map on properly, especially at the junctions between faces. Luckily there are a few tutorials and other resources out there to help. Forseti Svarog of the Electric Sheep Company has been especially gracious in sharing his insights on the subject, both on the web and in-world.

A key question for me in texturing is the degree to which one adds shading and shadows to the objects. As a starting point the goal is a relative degree of consistency in the tonality of the textures, lightening or darkening certain faces as required to differentiate them from each other and better express the shape of the prims. Following that some subtle shading is added where there are clearly awkward junctions between dissimilar materials. The problem is knowing where to stop. One thing that bugs me somewhat is when some standalone items like furniture have huge honkin’ shadows under them when the adjacent elements of the main build have none at all.

Stay tuned for tex-tour 3: the revenge…