My tutorials started with an adaptation of Xaoz's Basic Shirt Tutorial, of course with his permission. With Xaoz's retirement from tutoring, I started a new thread in the forum to cover GIMP tutorials. Although this was originally done with his permission, please respect his decision to step back from teaching and not contact him with questions regarding this or other aspects of texture design. There was some wording in this and forthcoming tutorials that refer back to either X's original thread or old systems of doing things. I have worked through this as I post them removing what could be confusing, but I know I'll miss something. If you find anything you don't understand please feel free to contact me.
Assumptions
For all of my tutorials I make the following assumptions
- You have downloaded and installed the GIMP
- You have downloaded and saved the meshes (UVMaps). They can be found by clicking the Clothing tab on your profile and using the “Designer Kit (Download)”.
DIRECT DOWNLOAD LINK to Designer Kit
-You have at least a basic an understanding of how textures work in both creation, storage and use in world (I may do a tutorial on some of this in due course).
- You have an idea of how to use GIMP, or at least have a handy page bookmarked that you can open alongside this.
Preamble
My reasons for adapting Xaoz’s tutorial for GIMP was because more questions about GIMP were arising and I thought it might help to do something specific. As I said X was kind enough to give me his permission to adapt his thread.
Some of the wording is verbatim (why fix what isn’t broken?) Changes are to fit with GIMP and some of my personal recommendations from what I have experienced.
This preamble runs through a few steps to prepare for the Basic Shirt Tutorial, but also serves as preparation for any mesh you intend to use.
So, step 1 and this is the big one….Open the program…
This should give you something like this:
If you do not have the Toolbox (left panel) press Ctrl+B,
If you do not have the Layers panel (right) press Ctrl+L,
If you do not have the middle panel, reduce all other windows. GIMP has a tendency to put this behind other windows, even when it is the active one….don’t ask me.
2) Open HF_Upperbody_Nude MediumPoly.jpg
Points of interest at this stage:
– MediumPoly refers to the legacy avatar
– at the top left you have the file name and extension, the settings of the image (most-all I have worked with have been RGB), the number of layers (at this stage only 1, though once you get going you’ll notice how they build up
) and the size of the image.At the bottom of the image is a drop down that makes zooming in and out really easy.
OK, my recommendation…Check the size of your picture, some meshes are 2048x2048, some 1024x1024 and there may even be some that are 512x512. I have resized all my meshes to 1024x1024. Although on my laptop I can’t see all of 1024x1024, it allows me to zoom in to do far more detailed work.
So….Select the Image menu, then Scale Image… This box will pop up:
Change the Image size – Width to 1024, when you press tab, you will notice that the Height changes proportionally. See the chain to the right of these boxes? If that is connected, this will keep things in proportion, if not it will only change 1 setting.
Leave everything else the same and click Scale.
My next recommendation is to save this file in GIMP format with an appropriate name.
The naming convention I use is based on the standard UV naming convention. At this stage I have the file saved as UFUT_bbl_mesh.xcf (xcf is the extension for GIMP files). If the file type list isn’t showing at the bottom, just click on the '+' to open it (conversely '–' closes the list)
More details about the naming conventions are here:
The UFUT is part of the convention
_bbl_ is my tag, so please think up a unique one for yourself
Then a description – mesh, yellow_tutorial, my first shirt, shirt 01. It is worthwhile taking your time over this and think of a system that will make it easy for you.
From this window you can select location, create folders etc., much the same as other Windows programs.
As mentioned above, you might want to run through all these steps above with all the mesh files, so you are ready for when you want to work on them.
