When modeling I am often looking for just the right texture. I skip looking for textures in Second Life™ simply because it is too hard to look at what is there. Some Third Party Viewers have better tools for managing textures and there are texture managers for sell in SL and the Market Place. But, I find them slow and awkward.

I usually browse over to CG Textures. They have an easy to browse collection of textures. Some are great and some are crap. Most require some serious work before they can be used and many lack the supporting files; normal, specular, occlusion, etc. But, they are free, with a daily download limit.

RenderTexture.com

A new site I came across is RenderTextures.com. They also have free textures and Terms of Use I can live with. 

PRIVATE USE

You can freely use content in your own private projects and scenes. You can modify materials from this site at your own direction.

COMMERCIAL USE

You can freely use content of the site for the creation of commercial products in any form, as long as your product is not actually texture itself.

SELL / REDISTRIBUTE

You can NOT sell or redistribute the content in modified or not modified form, as a standalone product or in the composition of the collections.

REPUBLISH

You can post images from this site only if there will be a direct visible link to rendertextures.com as the author. You are not allowed to distribute any other material downloaded from rendertextures.com (materials, textures, cropped photos, reference photos, etc.). Also you may not change files themselves or their names in downloadable archives (*.zip).

The textures are available as: diffuse, normal, bump, and displacement. For SL we are interested in diffuse, the texture type we are familiar with, and normal maps. The Materials System is chugging along and will be here in the next few weeks. Then these normal map images/textures will be important to us. So, if you are building now and consider using normal maps the change once SL updates SHOULD be simple.

I try to avoid using the word ‘should’. It is too misleading and as many people use it: a statement that signals a lack of knowledge. But, from what I can surmise, adding a normal map to an SL object is going to be as simple as applying a texture. The hard part is going to be in creating the normal map for a given diffuse map (texture).  So, getting the normal map with a texture is a smart thing to do.

The selection is not very big. CG Textures has more textures. But, what is there is pretty nice.