Page 3
Ok, now we want to give our window a little depth, so we’ll put a little shadow in there. First, lets setup our tools, and make a selection that’s off-set from the window frame, but the same basic size….
Set the tools up
Choose the paint brush, choose the color palate and make it black, finally, choose the size of the “footprint” of the paint brush so it’s large, for ease of use, but small enough so it won’t easily spill out into our clear window. Make sure the new layer is activated. It should have been created one layer up from your activated layer. You can move your layers around with the arrows in the Layers window. Put this new layer in the middle, between the wallpaper and the window frame. Now, draw a black shadow (I know it looks dumb but you can see what you’re doing this way better. By the way, there is an undo function under edit, if you haven’t found it yet:
Undo
Now, zoom in on the picture, at the corners, and free hand an angle. Do this by making your paint brush “footprint” a little smaller.
Zoom in
and finally, with all that done, we just need to adjust the transparency of the shadow layer to allow some of the wallpaper to come through. Do this by dragging the transparency bar over to the right to about 60%
Lighten the load
Next, we’re going to save our work in the native gimp file format (.xcf) so that we can always come back to this project and make adjustments. In this case, right click in the image, go to “File”, then “Save as” and make sure the choice is “By Extension” so all we have to do is give the wall a name, and put an extension of .xcf . To locate the folder you want to save to, click to pull down the top bar (where you see it says c:\Documents and Settings\......) and choose which drive you want to save it in, then select the directories from the list on the left, and name your file, including the extension for the type of file you want to save ( such as wall.xcf)
Save as Gimp
Well, we’re almost there, The last steps are to merge visible layers (do NOT flatten image, it will create a background, and remove your transparent center!!! Choose the default “expand as necessary” which will keep it looking just as you see it (in case any layers are smaller than the whole)
Merge Visible Layers
And finally, save as .tga. In this case, right click in the image, go to File, then Save as and make sure the choice is “By Extension” so all we have to do is give the wall a name, and put an extension of .tga this time. Again, to locate the folder you want to save to, click to pull down the top bar (where you see it says c:\Documents and Settings\......) and choose which drive you want to save it in, then select the directories from the list on the left, and name your file, including the extension for the type of file you want to save (such as wall.tga). .jpg’s do NOT do transparencies, and Second Life uses .tga’s for images with transparencies.
Save As Window
Finally, just choose the default location for the origin unless you have a reason not to, and you’re finished! If you like to, you can right click on the image below and select “save target as”.
I will be doing a class in-world and it’s recommended that you complete this tutorial prior to class, however it’s not imperative. See you there!!!
Love Ingie
Or continue with your window in A Gimp Tutorials Part 2! >>