-Bellisserians Show Off Your Home and Garden-

[Marisa Starbrook]

Loved what you did to the outsides of your homes, @Nika Talajand @Frigga Freidman! The insides look pretty cool, too!

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

9 hours ago, Frigga Freidman said:

I've done something similar, but created a transparent-background .png from vectors that I adapted and re-colored from black to blue. The one on the outside of the house is at 75% transparency and the one in the bathroom is over 80%. They are on 2 faces of a single object. (This is the Lauderdale, and the measurements to use for this wall are 9.8m x 4.9m x 0.2m - just make sure there's no image in the upper corners, and the top, sides and bottom faces are set to 100% transparent!) 

I like to make "murals" on interior walls, too. I'll have to try it on the exterior sometime!

 

[Matthieu Quander]

Overlays are probably my favorite decorating tool, though I likely use them excessively.  

[Frigga Freidman]

43 minutes ago, Sylvia Tamalyn said:

I like to make "murals" on interior walls, too. I'll have to try it on the exterior sometime!

 

I'm still trying to find an image that works well in my Lauderdale's upstairs hallway - it does look *very* good in your alcove!

[Frigga Freidman]

2 minutes ago, Matthieu Quander said:

Overlays are probably my favorite decorating tool, though I likely use them excessively.  

I've yet to master corners or window cutouts  

Edited April 22, 2021 by Frigga Freidman

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

2 minutes ago, Frigga Freidman said:

I'm still trying to find an image that works well in my Lauderdale's upstairs hallway - it does look *very* good in your alcove!

Thank you! That's just a photo I took in SL.  

[Matthieu Quander]

Just now, Frigga Freidman said:

I've yet to master corners or window cutouts  

It's all math.  I probably use Excel more than GIMP when building/texturing.  

[Frigga Freidman]

1 minute ago, Matthieu Quander said:

It's all math.  I probably use Excel more than GIMP when building/texturing.  

How much LI do your Havana exteriors total? 

[Matthieu Quander]

5 minutes ago, Frigga Freidman said:

How much LI do your Havana exteriors total? 

Assuming you mean everything outside, I am using 143 LI for the outside of my Havana Havana, and The House of Blues uses 124.  Neither total includes my shells, as more of the LI for those applies to the inside, and I have some other items linked to them.  I may have missed a shrub or 3 on the House of Blues, as linking most of the landscaping was not beneficial. 

If you mean just my shells, My Havana Havana is 10 LI, and House of blues is 11 LI.  Both include lower half of all exterior walls, all interior walls, all ceilings, ceiling beams, and all floors.  The House of Blues shell also includes the original decks, stairs, and exterior ceilings.   

[Matthieu Quander]

And for those who are curious, I build all of my shells and add-ons in world using prims, I texture everything as prims first, and then I use Mesh Generator to convert the prims to mesh.  I do all of my texturing with GIMP.  Excel helps me with both prim and texture placement.  

I know I can just export my prims as Collada files instead of using Mesh Generator for that step, but mesh objects created by Mesh Generator tend to be much more efficient regarding LI, and as we all know, maximizing LI efficiency means we can place more stuff.

[Leora Greenwood]

14 hours ago, Nika Talaj said:

That's why there's a merry-go-round and such a cute dog in front.

 

 

I just love the puppy in his glasses reading on the porch!  May I ask where he is from?  I did a MP search but unsuccessfully.

[CandyJewels]

16 minutes ago, Leora Greenwood said:

I just love the puppy in his glasses reading on the porch!  May I ask where he is from?  I did a MP search but unsuccessfully.

+Half-Deer+  😃

[Nika Talaj]

2 hours ago, Matthieu Quander said:

Overlays are probably my favorite decorating tool, though I likely use them excessively. 

No.  Your builds are an education.

I still like your houseboat build best, and it is very very dense with overlays and other creations.  It is like the inside of an artist's mind.

[Matthieu Quander]

27 minutes ago, Nika Talaj said:

No.  Your builds are an education.

I still like your houseboat build best, and it is very very dense with overlays and other creations.  It is like the inside of an artist's mind.

Thank you very much.  it is probably my favorite as well, though I do like them all.

 

[Rabid Cheetah]

I gotta figure out how to do this vector stuff, it looks amazing.

[Frigga Freidman]

27 minutes ago, Rabid Cheetah said:

I gotta figure out how to do this vector stuff, it looks amazing.

Something like Sylvia's mural doesn't need to be a vector, provided you don't need to resize the image much. For the "supergraphics", the real trick is ensuring that your *proportions* are correct - i.e. 1:1 (square) or 2:1 so you don't have to fiddle with horizontal/vertical offsets, etc. and to make the background and everything you don't want to see transparent in your graphics editor. Oops - dinner's being served. I can get back later with more info if you have questions! What graphics editor do you have?

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

19 minutes ago, Frigga Freidman said:

Something like Sylvia's mural doesn't need to be a vector, provided you don't need to resize the image much. For the "supergraphics", the real trick is ensuring that your *proportions* are correct - i.e. 1:1 (square) or 2:1 so you don't have to fiddle with horizontal/vertical offsets, etc. and to make the background and everything you don't want to see transparent in your graphics editor. Oops - dinner's being served. I can get back later with more info if you have questions! What graphics editor do you have?

Yeah, I do easy projects since I don't have a graphics editor. My murals are all just "texture on a prim" and if I want to get fancy, I tweak the transparency % of the object's face.   

[Matthieu Quander]

27 minutes ago, Sylvia Tamalyn said:

Yeah, I do easy projects since I don't have a graphics editor. My murals are all just "texture on a prim" and if I want to get fancy, I tweak the transparency % of the object's face.   

If you ever do want to explore graphics editing, I highly recommend GIMP.  It is free, open source, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, has a ton of user support and tutorials available, and can do pretty much everything the expensive editors can do.   

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

10 minutes ago, Matthieu Quander said:

If you ever do want to explore graphics editing, I highly recommend GIMP.  It is free, open source, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, has a ton of user support and tutorials available, and can do pretty much everything the expensive editors can do.   

Thank you! I have heard of it, but assumed it would be lacking in documentation since it's free. I'll take a look!  

[Nika Talaj]

53 minutes ago, Sylvia Tamalyn said:

Thank you! I have heard of it, but assumed it would be lacking in documentation since it's free. I'll take a look!  

GIMP is actually useful in RL.  I've done greeting cards, simple flyers, and even reno mockups in it many times.

It took me less than 10 minutes to make the seagull texture once I found the source photo.  I meant to take a little more time and thicken up one of the gulls, in addition to giving a 3D effect with a little bevel and drop shadow, but didn't get to it.

Gimp's online manual and official tutorials have progressed to the point of often being useful!  Tho I have to admit that I generally still just fish around on youtube when I don't know how to do something specific.  You have to be careful with random youtube tutorials because they are often for older versions of GIMP, which sometimes evolves rather quickly. 

I have to say that, unlike many more proficient GIMP users, I am really loving the latest version of it (2.10.xx). It seems more intuitive to me, I think it will be easier for new users.

To me, 2.10 seems less likely to seduce you into doing stupid things.  My least favorite stupid thing used to be accidentally un-docking and losing the dialog boxes on either side of the main window, because I use those layers and tool options dialogs constantly.  They are easy to get back, but it was irritating to lose them.

[Matthieu Quander]

1 hour ago, Nika Talaj said:

My least favorite stupid thing used to be accidentally un-docking and losing the dialog boxes on either side of the main window, because I use those layers and tool options dialogs constantly.  They are easy to get back, but it was irritating to lose them.

That still happens to me, even on the latest version, but thankfully it is a rare occurrence.  

[Frigga Freidman]

34 minutes ago, Nika Talaj said:

I have to say that, unlike many more proficient GIMP users, I am really loving the latest version of it (2.10.xx). It seems more intuitive to me, I think it will be easier for new users.

To me, 2.10 seems less likely to seduce you into doing stupid things.  My least favorite stupid thing used to be accidentally un-docking and losing the dialog boxes on either side of the main window, because I use those layers and tool options dialogs constantly.  They are easy to get back, but it was irritating to lose them.

I'm a proficient Photoshop user (though still using CS4) and haven't looked at GIMP in 18+ years (when I found its user interface maddening). I've just installed it now and its UI appears to have improved greatly (tooltips! intuitively-organized menus!) I'm still finding selecting a silhouette image (screengrabbed from the web rather than downloaded as a true vector image) with clean outlines trickier than in Photoshop, but with zooming in and experimenting with threshold levels for the selection, it's doable.

For those who haven't used a graphics editor, this is how I replicated what I'd already done in Photoshop:

Step 01: File > New  - I created a canvas of 1024 x 512 pixels with a transparent background.

Step 02: I opened a silhouette image that I'd screengrabbed from the web - note that this is not a true vector (which means that if you resize it dramatically, you'll lose a crisp outline)

Step 03: I've selected all the white background - Select > By Color (You may need to zoom in to make sure you've selected as much of the white as possible; experiment with the radius and/or threshold options)

Step 04: Select > Invert

Step 05: Edit > Copy

Step 06: Click on the thumbnail of the transparent canvas created in Step 01, then Edit > Paste

Step 07: Now you can use the tools in the upper left of the screen to move the bird, rotate it, change its size, change its color, etc. (Actually, it's better to keep the color black and then tint the image within SL, as using GIMP I wound up with a partial thin black outline around a red bird.)

Step 08: File > Export As... PNG (Unfortunately, GIMP then crashed and as I didn't save the actual GIMP file first my work was lost, so incomplete screengrabs  )

Please keep in mind that with any graphics editor, there's more than one way to accomplish the same task!

 

 

[Anaryane]

You can use Krita (efficient for artist etc.), or inkscape to create vector image. Free too !

I like your creativity. I used many "stickers" to decorate houses etc., but yes... Just a prim with transparency for me too, because im lazy 😄

Nice alcove for the bedroom, I like this ^^

 

Edited April 23, 2021 by Anaryane

[Rabid Cheetah]

I've used Paintshop Pro, back when it was shareware on BBS's.  Currently I use good old Windows Paint lol

[Coffee Pancake]

28 minutes ago, Rabid Cheetah said:

Currently I use good old Windows Paint lol

Try https://www.getpaint.net/