I was excited to see that Tegan Serin of floorplan. include a full perm texture with her Arrow Scroll for Collabor88. This allows us to change the appearance of the scroll, replacing the text with our own, for example. This does not let someone make them to resell because the form is not full-perm. She’s not the only one. The loveseat from Trompe Loeil which is also at Collabor88 included the textures for folks who like to customize their own.

Here you can see the original scroll with the other items from the Consignment and Floorplan. double date at Collabor88. The original scroll featured Sonnet 18 from Shakespeare, a beautiful poem, but I wanted something shorter. I decided to put up a quote about cats and am going to show you how I did it.

So the first thing to do is save the texture to your hard drive because you need to work on this outside of Second Life. I save it as a targa (.tga) because from what I have read, if the object has a targa texture, you are less likely to get the funny alpha glitch that makes your hair look funky. I could do this because I have PhotoShop. If you are going to do this in one of those browser-based editing programs like Pixlr or LunaPic, you probably should save it as a .png which is compatible with more programs.

My next step was to take a photo of Oscar and make it look like a vintage sketch. I used a free filter in Filter Forge.  You could also do a search for royalty free vintage sketches which would probably look good on the scroll.

There are lots of possibilities depending on what quote you decide to use.

This is what I ended up with. The quote is from Jules Renard. It says, “The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat.” I chose a script style font to make it look right for a scroll, which of course would be hand-written. Then you upload the texture.

The next step is replacing the original texture with the new one you made. You edit the scroll and click on the textures tab, notice that I have chose the Select Face option so only this texture is changed – in case there are multiple textures. Sometimes there are, so make it a habit to edit textures using Select Face so you don’t change multiple faces by mistake.  If you do, just cancel before you close the window and it will go back to normal.

As you can see, it’s not terribly difficult to customize and object when the designer includes the texture and allows you that freedom.