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Photoshop Sculptie Guide

This guide is to help sculptie-creators using Photoshop to directly manipulate their sculpt maps. If you're using a different application, try one of the following guides:

Photoshop Elements
Paint Shop Pro
The GIMP

This guide is not meant to teach you how to make awesome textures for your sculpts. If you're looking for something like that, you will have to search elsewhere.

This guide was created in Photoshop CS1 for Windows XP. There shouldn't be much difference for other versions.

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Select a single channel in the channels menu and go to Image > Adjustments > Invert.

Select the entire image (all channels) and flip the image horizontally.

Save and upload to Second Life.

Mirroring

Mirroring in the full version of Photoshop is rather easy. Moreso than any other application that I've tried. This is mostly because editing color channels is so intuitive. With this feature alone, in my opinion, you have gotten your money's worth (though there are many other features in Photoshop that make it well worth the price).

In Photoshop, the channels menu looks like the image here. The combined RGB channels are represented by a full-color thumbnail, while the individual color channels are shown as greyscale images underneath. Selected channels are highlighted. Visible channels have the 'eye' icon on the left.

Our example sculpt map.

Open your sculpt map in your editor. Go to the channels menu and select one channel (remember that Red = X, Green = Y, and Z = Blue). Photoshop will probably make that channel the only one visible. Now go to the top menu and select Image > Adjustments > Invert.

The blue channel, before and after inverting.

This has mirrored your sculpt, but it's also flipped your normals, so your sculpt would be inside-out if you uploaded it as is. So now, select all your channels by clicking the RGB "channel" at the top of the channel menu. Then go to the top menu and select Image > Rotate Canvas > Flip Image Horizontally.

The sculpt map before and after flipping.

Your sculpt map is now mirrored. Save it and upload to Second Life.

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Add a black Alpha Channel to the channel palette in Photoshop and save as a 32-bit TGA file.

OR

Promote the background to a layer and then set the layer opacity to 1% or higher. Save as a PNG file.

Alpha Protection

To add alpha protection to your sculpt map, you have to use either the TGA or PNG file formats. How you add the protection depends on which file format you decide to use.

TGA Format

TGA alpha protection in Photoshop is the most direct and (in my opinion) easiest method for adding alpha protection.

All we have to do is go into the channels menu (shown left) and hit the "New Channel" button on the bottom of the menu. (It looks exactly like the New Layer button in the layers menu.)

By default, Photoshop will make a new Alpha Channel, and it will probably be all black, which is what we want. If the alpha channel is white instead, select it and fill it in black.

Now save the file as TGA. Photoshop will bring up a dialog, asking you a few things. Just make sure that it's set to 32bit. Nothing else matters. Save and upload into Second Life.

PNG Format

As much as I prefer TGA alpha channels, there are people who swear by PNG format because.. well, you can see the transparency directly on the image, rather than having to interpret the alpha channel.

But NOTE to png users. In order to make the file size smaller, Photoshop does NOT save RGB values for completely transparent pixels in a PNG image. So if you insist on using PNG, here is what you have to do.

In the Layers menu, make the background layer into a normal layer. This can be done by double-clicking the background and hitting "OK" on the dialog that comes up.

Now change the opacity of the layer to 1% or higher. This will still keep your sculpt map from being stolen while forcing Photoshop to save the RGB information to the sculpt map image.

Save as PNG with no interlace and upload to Second Life.

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Remember to play around with what you've learned. Experiment. Be adventurous. Make mistakes.
Nothing in Blender is precious.

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