Making a set of drawers : Building with textures

My thought process is never straight forward (and a bit like my inventory – things can get messy). I have always been curious about how other people work, some seem highly organised and creative, me I am a bit more haphazard in my approach, but what is good for the goose as the saying goes I’ll give it a try and get more organised and show you my work flow for building the simplest set of drawers!

I always start with the Textures, sometimes a build will come into my head but before I have even touched the edit button in Second Life, photoshop is open and things start to happen!  I had just finished the Chalk Board Textures when I thought they would make great drawer fronts, a place to write what’s buried inside and somewhere to doodle on the front :)

The front of the drawers is one texture made in photoshop from a reclaimed wood texture and a chalk texture, a quick cut and arranging of the pieces, added some shading and the front is ready and now I head for Second Life :)

Everything starts life as a prim.

I said earlier it was simple, start with a box, stretch it into a rectangular shape (note here on sizes in Second Life – I have no rules on sizes but I do like things not to be too large or really tiny for my avatar, I try to scale most things to fit so they are just a little too big for me, as I am on the smaller size or I use something as a reference point, like a chair or sofa.

(Helpful hint: It can be easier in the beginning to work in whole numbers or halves and quarters so you can line up prims and stretch textures more accurately by typing in the sizes and rotations in the edit tab)

Next copy the rectangle (shift and pull the arrow up or down), flatten the prim and adjust the height so it is at the top of the first prim.  Shift and copy this prim and position at the bottom (the blue shapes in the pictures)

To make the legs (green prims), again shift and copy, re size and place at one corner and it’s now easy to make the other three legs by copying and then placing them at the other edges (If you have used the more mathematical approach you can enter the exact coordinates in the edit tab)

Textures can make or break a buikd.

I started with two textures, the drawer front and one from the reclaimed wood pack with a paneled effect. I selected all the prims and in the build tab under textures I dragged the wood tga so it covered everything and then dragged the drawers texture onto the front of the largest prim.

Not bad! But you can see where the texture looks stretched and squished at the top.

I selected the front of the top prim and adjusted the repeats per face, changed the rotation so the texture is turned 90 degrees and offset the images until I found a part of the texture that looked best.

I really liked the way the shading on the texture falls at the bottom edge….

If your shading falls differently the quickest way to make the texture fit is to flip it, by ticking the boxes you can chage the image from left to right and upside down or both!

Next I move around and select different faces, adjusting them so they all match or look natural.

Not forgetting the sides and back (and underneath) :D  (Helpful hint: I sometimes add a dark grey or lilac colour/tint to the underside textures where the shadows are always darker)

10 minutes later and a bit more fiddling and the basic chest of drawers is finished!

Once you have got this far it is pretty easy with a bit of rearranging to make a few coordinating bits of furniture…a tall cabinet perhaps…

……..with a few extra accessories and some chalk drawings added to the front of the drawer texture.  That’s one way I build, my work flow if you like, how about you?  Do you take a builders approach first or do have an idea in your mind and then make it happen? :)

You can see the finished Set of Drawers and it’s variations over at insight designs.