Texturing: two ways to do it

If you are creating textures for objects in SL (whether they are pre-fab mesh models you've purchased or your own mesh creations), you will need GOOD textures or your creations will look amateurish regardless of how good the mesh is.

There are basically two ways to do textures for SL:

  • Manually created textures—these are done basically "by hand" (i.e., in Photoshop or some similar texture editing application) using UV and AO maps to place elements specifically where you want them
  • "Procedurally" created textures—where you use a tool like Substance Painter to generate textures for your objects
(If you aren't making your own mesh, the second option is unavailable to you.)

I used the manual approach for YEARS in SL, and I'd like to think I got pretty good at it. Even after I started making my own mesh, I continued with this method for a long time. There are a some advantages to this method, mostly related to the limits of faces that SL imposes and the efficiency for rendering that a fully-packed UV allows (and which a good bit of pre-fab mesh is set up for). But it is incredibly tedious, and has great challenges as well. For example, one of the hardest parts for me was learning to do specular highlights, which can take hours all by themselves—but which make a piece look truly realistic when done right.

If you create your own mesh, you can achieve some work-arounds for the time consumption by learning how to bake textures in Blender (or Maya, etc.). This will save you all the time on things like shadows and highlights, and can lead to some truly magnificent textures. But baking textures in Blender takes a ton of time itself, and it's generally low-in-productivity time (because it occupies Blender, and consumes a good bit of your computer's resources). 

About 18 months before I quit Salacity, I started using Substance Painter to texture my own mesh. This approach offers ALL of the creativity and detail that manual creation offers, and more. But it also makes texturing mesh a lot faster, and frankly a lot more fun. Plus, with the right settings, you can "bake" your textures right in Substance Painter and save almost all of the time that Blender requires for baking. There are other things that commend Substance Painter, too, including a tremendous library of textures that are probably better (and certainly are more usable within Substance Painter) than most of the ones you may gather elsewhere.

For those of you who make your own mesh, I highly recommend that. you give Substance Painter (or one of its competitors, like ZBrush, 3DCoat, or others) a look. If you don't create your own mesh, I actually recommend that you DON'T look at these, because they will only make you envious!

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