If you’ve ever built anything in Second Life, then chances are that your inventory is heaving with textures. Once you start obtaining textures in SL it can lead your inventory to spiral rapidly out of control. You start with a few freebies from the NCI Freebie Wall packs, and before you know it you’ve spent thousands at some of the big texture stores in-world.

Thing is, you need to be able to access those textures quickly the next time you’re building something, and it helps if you can see them displayed, rather than clicking one texture after another in your inventory and waiting for them to load. But if you have lots of textures sitting in your inventory so you can access them easily, then you’ll never get that inventory size down.

So what can you do about it?

Well, naturally, the answer is some form of texture organiser, and you’ll find a whole bunch of them on SL Marketplace, from free to not-so-free. Some have a gazillion bells and whistles and some are very simple. In this post I’m going to give you a quick guide to using a dollarbie texture organiser that comes with a HUD (most of the cheapies and freebies don’t include a HUD version, but this one does) – tx Oh’s YATO-BF (aka: Yet Another Texture Organiser- But Free!)

Hop behind the cut!

First, of course, you need to obtain the YATO-BF. While you can find it absolutely free in-world (just go to any of the NCI locations and look on their Freebie Wall) the version that I got from there doesn’t include the HUD (even though the ad texture says that it does. So go here and buy the L$1 version. This not only includes a HUD version; it also includes a sculpty-organiser. Not bad for one measly Linden dollar! (By the way, you can delete the ‘set text’ script in the folder. That just adds the hovering text above the box when you rez it. Remember: all those little scripts that you don’t need add up to bloat your inventory!)

First, make sure you’re in a place where you can rez things, so a sandbox or your home is ideal.

Once you’ve unpacked it, find the HUD in the folder and right-click > Wear. It will attach to a HUD point and you can edit it to move it around until it’s in a good place. It’ll look like this on your screen:

Click on the little blue button and look for a popup:

There are several pre-loaded categories, so click one to check it out. Mar clicked the ‘Organic’ category, and the organiser HUD changed to look like this:

(Yes, this post was screencapped across a couple of days, hence the changing sky!)

To start adding your own textures (and yes, I’m afraid this means you probably need to sort them a bit first!) click the blue button again and then click the ‘New Category’ button on the menu. Now, look down! You should see a little basket at your feet, with green floating text above it, like this:

That’s called the Keydumper. Right-click > Edit it and click the Contents tab. (If you don’t see a Contents tab, look for a ‘More’ button or a little arrow. One or other should be there, and that will toggle between full and minimal mode in the Edit window.)

Mar’s going to load a small set of textures first: these snow and ice ones from the Freebie Wall at one of the NCI locations. Notice that she’s made a new notecard in that folder, called Snow/Ice. Make a notecard in your texture folder and give it a short name (short enough to fit on one of those menu buttons) –

Select all the textures in the folder and drag them across to the Contents tab of the Keydumper and wait. You’ll see the floating text above the Keydumper changing as it works:

Finally, in local chat, it will list the UUIDs of all the textures you put inside it. Since the text is yellow, that means only you (the object’s owner) can see it, so you won’t be spamming anyone around you!

Open up the local chat panel and select all of the lines, as shown. Don’t worry if you have timestamps shown, as Mar does. That won’t make any difference:

Now hit Control + C (Command + C on a Mac) to copy your highlighted text. Then, open up the new notecard you created in the texture folder in your inventory, and hit Control + V (Command + V on a Mac) to paste it in. Click the Save button and wait until the greying-out goes away:

Right-click > Edit the HUD that you’re wearing, and go to the Contents tab. Drag the notecard you just filled with text into the contents tab:

Come out of Edit mode and click the HUD’s blue button again. This time you should see your new category on the menu (in this case, Mar’s Snow/Ice category) –

Click that category button and voila! Your textures will load. Click the small version to load a bigger version beside it:

Note: I was puzzled as to why I had three grey ‘textures’ there, until I went back to the notecard. Scroll back to the screenshot of that and notice that I’d moved the cursor down by three lines. I did this originally because I’d planned to edit the cursor line out in Photoshop, just to make the screenshot look a bit neater, but I forgot to do it. I can’t be certain, but I think that explains the three grey ‘textures’, so make sure that your cursor is blinking at the end of the final line of text when you save your notecard!

 

“But how do I get textures out of the organiser, Mar? Clicking the big picture sends it back into the HUD! Help!”

Hm. This one puzzled me for a bit, too, until I read the Marketplace listing more closely. It says:

Apply textures from the YATO-BF works well with the pipette (eye dropper, drop picker) from the texture selection pane.

Aha! OK, so let’s rez a cube and try texturing it that way. I’ve selected one snow/ice texture to show in the big pane and I’ve clicked the Texture tab on my new prim, then the Texture box on the left of that tab. Note the little eyedropper icon at the bottom of that tab (arrowed) –

Clicking that eyedropper will turn your cursor into an eyedropper (unfortunately I couldn’t screencap that) so all you need to do now is click that eyedropper on the big texture showing on your HUD, and wow!

There it is! Just click the Select button to finalise, and your prim is textured!

Remember, to texture just one side (or more) of a prim, check the Select Texture radio button on the Edit menu:

Then click whichever sides you want to texture. They’ll get a faint white target on them, like the one you can see here:

Then, just use the eyedropper as before:

And that’s it! You can now achive all of your textures so they’re no longer cluttering your inventory :)