i go batty about matching colours but sometimes that just takes messing around in when dealing with virtual worlds. if you are trying to match something that someone else made sometimes you can export the texture out but not always. now if it is stuff you are making, it becomes much easier. i have been on a kick of using in-world colours whenever i can because it is simpler and i presume it has less overhead for the server and viewer

a few months ago i learned that wind turbines take a serious toll on bats. when bats are chasing their dinners (bugs) they can get taken out by wind turbines and at first it sounds like “sucks to be a bat” but after you learn that bats are responsible for about half of the world’s pollination of fruits we eat, then it sounds like “crap, we need to do something about this”. fortunately, scientists in Europe found a very easy way to help the bats and that is by painting wind turbines purple! what an easy fix (although painting a turbine sounds like a huge job)

even though that was discovered a year ago, wind turbines are still typically built as white – it takes a while for people to catch on (poor bats)

so we had white wind turbines in Enclave Harbour and, even though we don’t have any prim bats fluttering about, it seemed like a good idea to make them purple. that was easy since and a quick colour picker second later and voila – purple bat-friendly wind turbines! =)

but . . . there is the Enclave Harbour logo on the back set on a white background =(

if you are new to making your own stuff, then this tip may come in handy. colours in-world are all RGB-based and that makes it easy to match them with your favourite image editing software (gimp, photoshop, fireworks, etc)

for this example of the purple wind turbines, i just pulled up the editing panel and selected the purple texture and copied the Red, Green, and Blue numbers over to the new Enclave Harbour logo and an easy match was made

now the bats are happy (the bugs are not) and we have plenty of fruit (or fruity avatars) and all is right in the colour world! =)