I have a purchased blank sign that needs text. How do I write and make text to fill in the sign?

[Alwin Alcott]

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[Alwin Alcott]

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[AmandaHoliday]

I thought it would be for you technical people since it seems technical to me. Another sign I had used a texture, but the background disappeared. I contacted the creator of that sign and he said I needed to add a prim for another texture layer, but was awfully short of instructions how to do that. So sorry if I over estimated your abilities.

[Rolig Loon]

It all depends on what kind of sign it is, and how you want to put information on it.  If it is basically a flat surface that is meant to have a simple, unchanging image  (words or a picture) on it, all you have to do is drag a texture onto it with your mouse.  Make the texture in Photoshop or GIMP, following some basic rules (PNG, TGA, JPG, or BMT format only -- pixel dimensions in powers of two -- and no dimension larger than 1024 pixels) and upload it to your viewer.  See https://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Textures-and-alpha-channels/ta-p/700157 for a start.

If your sign is meant to have changeable content, that's significantly more difficult.  In that case, you'll need to write a LSL script to handle the changing content, or pay someone else to write a script for you unless the sign come with one.  There are several different ways to import and animate changeable content -- too many and too complicated to describe here.

[AmandaHoliday]

OK. Thank you for the link. Gives me a starting point.

 

It is a fixed sign, "Mandy's Diner", for the first ever try to do this. I've got Corel's Paintshop. Am I SOL or does that have similar capabilities to Photoshop? If it does, I'll struggle through the Help until I find the instructions, but I don't want to spend time on an ultimately fruitless search.

[Rolig Loon]

I have never used Corel's Paintshop, so I can't count as an expert. It's my understanding that it cannot create a 32 bit texture -- that is, one capable of supporting an alpha channel, which you would need for transparency -- but it can handle basic drawing and can generate textures in the standard formats (PNG, TGA, JPG, and BMT) acceptable for upload to SL. As long as you're not trying to do anything overly fancy, it ought to work just fine. Creating simple textures for SL is not really rocket science. People make rudimentary ones with PowerPoint, even. If you want to make GOOD textures, you'll eventually want to learn how to fly a real graphics program, but it's not necessary to start. BTW, Photoshop is pricey (I pay $29/month), but GIMP is free and it does all of the same basic things that Photoshop does.

[Alwin Alcott]

don't overestimate your own abilities, a white board could be a white prim...don't blame me for your limited description

[Rolig Loon]

NP, Amanda. You'll learn how to do this stuff pretty fast. It's just basic building/texturing that is well within your ability, believe me. You're cool. Just be patient and make copies along the way as you practice. You might also want to take a beginning course or two (FREE!) at a place like Builders Brewery or NCI or Caledon Oxbridge University.

 

[AmandaHoliday]

Maybe not able to do fancy stuff, but Paintshop worked just fine for a white sign with red letters. I'm not an expert either because I just used it to crop and resize photos, so all of this is brand new territory. The biggest surprise was how easy it was when I uploaded the photo to Drop Box and moved it to inventory. The hardest part was reading all the instructions on Paintshop's Help pages to get started. LMAO