Tip: Save money on texture uploads and ID your archived stuff

Remember this post that I made quite a while back? – Dollarbies at ETD

And then this post about archiving all the hair that I bought there? – Update and a useful tip

Well here I am with a tip that will save you a LOT of money in the long run, if you want to be able to identify all the stuff you have in your archives.

Let’s take a look at all that hair. Now, I could upload all the pics that I took for that post, and use each one to texture that style’s archive box. Or I could perhaps place all of those pics (in texture format) in a single folder called ‘Pictures of ETD hair in archive box number ##’. Or I could even put them into a notecard, if I was concerned about adding lots of items (those individual pictures) to my inventory.

But, no matter what, I would still be paying 10L$ per picture to upload them. At a total of 19 styles, that would cost me 190L$. And this is where my sneaky little tip comes in handy. I opened my Photoshop (you can use Paint Shop Pro, or The Gimp – which is a freebie image editing program) and resized all of those screenshots. First, I cropped them all to a uniform square size, then I resized them all to 128×128, which is a quarter of the size of a standard 512×512 texture upload in SL. Then, I created a blank 512×512 texture in Photoshop, and pasted 16 of the pictures in a 4×4 grid onto it, and I also wrote the name of each style in each individual picture.

I ended up with this:

I then uploaded that picture, at a cost of just 10L$. And here’s where the crafty bit comes in. Hop behind the cut to read more.

Sim Freebie Walkaround: Wollstonecraft Place

Here we go, off on another Sim Freebie Walkaround. This time we’re getting Steamy, Edwardian, and Whovian in the rather bogglingly brilliant Wollstonecraft Place area of Maske sim. There is steampunky, urchiny, Dr Whovian goodness galore here, plenty of great freebies and some very clever twists to the build.

Hop behind the cut. Sensitive gentlemen of the age may wish to avert their eyes. Intelligent women lurk within, and they demand suffrage…

Freebies: Urban textures and items

I think I just hit the motherlode of freebie urban items and textures. Head on over to Urban Spirit in Shiot. The entire build is available for free. Yes, every single grubby mattress, garbage truck, cardboard box, trashcan, skip, dumpster, etc is set to ‘free to copy’. Not only that, but the build has a freebie textures store, too. You’ll find that by the TP point (it’s the place with a giant clown’s head above the door). There’s also dumpster diving to be had just inside the shop doorway. Look for the trashcan on the left, with the sign poking out of it, right-click the can and select ‘harvest’. You never know what delights you might come up with…

If you can, drop a few L$ into the tipjar there, because owner Astin Miles has created a treasure trove for urban junkies at Urban Spirit :)